6 ms·

I basically agree with what you've said, except I do think that some terms are intentionally overloaded for political purposes. As long as the language is withi

by edbob 6y ago

I basically agree with what you've said, except I do think that some terms are intentionally overloaded for political purposes. As long as the language is within the field, between academics, then overloading can be fine. It's understood that the technical meaning can be completely divorced from the common meaning. The problems come about when people try to force technical definitions into the common vernacular. There are two main problems that arise: (1) As deanCommie's root-level comment exemplifies, contempt for non-academics and a complete lack of respect for ordinary usage. This is divisive and toxic for obvious reasons. (2) It's not uncommon to see people commandeer an extremely weighty term like "racism" to take advantage of the emotional power, but when examined they fall back to a technical definition which has only a small fraction of the power. This allows them to destroy someone's livelihood with accusations of racism, but then it turns out that what they really meant by "racism" was something like that person really likes Chinese food and wants to make a living serving it, which is precisely the opposite of what is ordinarily considered to be racism. It doesn't have to be that in particular which is characterized as racism. It can be many things: Wearing a dress to prom from a culture you admire, declining to support a partisan, openly Marxist corporation, expressing admiration of Jewish accomplishments, or expressing sympathy for the plight of young black men, but we see it all the time. Words are turned into weapons, and this overloading sleight of hand in an important enabler. "Racism" is by far the most destructive overloaded term, and the easiest to find stark examples for, but the same problems exist to a lesser degree in other terms. @coagmano's approach is great, because he wants to talk about real differences and find real solutions, not to play word games. But there are plenty of people who just want to destroy, or to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy in their pursuit of political power.

deanCommie 6y ago
I completely agree with your first 2 paragraphs. People pretend like describing a person or action as racist (in the academic definition) is a non-judgemental callout of our society's continued opportunity for improvement. However they ignore (willfully) the automatic mob that will invariably form to not educate but to chastise the person into oblivion (and taking their livelyhood in process). I do think we need a better way to callout subtle and insidious racism in people's beliefs and actions but make it an educational opportunity for growth for the person and for society, not the instigation of a pile on. Having said that, your specific examples are really strange, and I'd like to dive into why. Please make sure you understand, I do not do this to indict you, or accuse you of anything remotely of racism yourself. But your choices of example are strange because unfortunately I do think they are generally associated with malicious racists who use them as cover to have subtle plausible deniability. > openly Marxist corporation Speaking of words completely devoid of technical meaning. Can you clarify what you mean by openly Marxist corporations or offer an example? Because, I'm going to be honest, 99% of the usage of this term online today is not treated respectfully by neutral parties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... > expressing admiration of Jewish accomplishments Jewish or Israeli? The context matters significantly. It's naive to not be hypervigilant about both positive and negative discussions of Israelis and Jews online. You have everything on the spectrum: You have fully well-intentioned supporters of Palestianians and Palestine. But you also have duplicitous conmen who use the support of Palestine as a cover for blatant anti-semitism. You have fully well-intentioned supporters of Jews and Israel. And you have duplicitous conmen who use the support of Jews and Israel as a cover for blatant islamophobia, or worse Christian Supremacy. (Evangelical Christians in the US are militantly pro-Israel not because they so love their Jewish bretheren or hate Muslims, but simply because Israel has prophetic meaning in Evangelical Christian expectations of the Apocalypse/Rapture). The problem is that while the majority of people hold neutral/centrist beliefs on Palestine and Israel, the extremists are overrepresented online. Most likely when people react negatively to concepts like "expressing admiration of Jewish accomplishments", they are reacting to those in context > or expressing sympathy for the plight of young black men, Again, this seemingly uncontroversial concept is completely weaponized online. White supremacists (actual ones) will openly proclaim their concern for the plight of young black men. And they'll say that nobody can take care of them better than other black folks. Which is why 1) They should stop killing each other in greater numbers than white police do, and 2) This is why we need segregation so that White society can take care of itself, and Black society can do so also. This follow up isn't always visible and isn't always revealed. It comes later once the person who is operating in bad faith has earned trust and credibility.
- edbob 6y ago
  > I do think we need a better way to callout subtle and insidious racism in people's beliefs and actions but make it an educational opportunity for growth for the person and for society, not the instigation of a pile on. Terms like "unconscious bias" and "cultural appropriation" are fine. They have clear meanings, and AFAICT the terms themselves are never in dispute. In my personal experience, racism is a Very Big Deal, like murder, and it seems fundamentally wrong to diminish the meaning of the word by applying it to subtle, unintentional acts with debatable implications. It's as if one were to use the word "systemic murder" to describe the inefficient (in one's opinion) allocation of resources in medical research, and then used that term to characterize an entire society as essentially murderous and fascist. It just does not compute, and I don't think it does any good to insist on such terminology when it inevitably causes the conversation to derail into semantic disputes. Then the terms become useless for evangelizing, but very useful as litmus tests to enforce political allegiances and attack heterodox and non-conformist thinking. I'm guessing that you were fine with my first two examples since you didn't point those out, so I'll just provide sources for the last three. (Two are combined). Note that I rarely view anything on social media, so I'm not in that conversation. My views are my own. If they seem to echo the "talking points" of someone I've never heard of or some organization that I don't pay attention to, that is a coincidence. HN is my biggest news source by far. If you should happen to find my views distasteful, I assure you that it is due to a vastly different perspective and not bad faith. The admiration of Jews had nothing to do with Israel or Christianity. (As you noted, that could have made it a terrible example). The English lecturer Stephen Lamonby was fired as a result of his admiration of Jewish academics, saying "I was excited to think she might be one of them – excited to meet a Jewish physicist, who had been my heroes since boyhood."[0] This is precisely the opposite of what I would consider racism. It gets more interesting in that he defended the progressive position that blacks are disadvantaged by society, and this was somehow twisted around to make him a "racist". Not only did he say this, but he's apparently devoted significant time to helping out in disadvantaged countries and while in the UK gave special help to overseas students, and was attacked as racist for this: "Mr Lamonby noted that some of the overseas students were struggling to grasp even the most basic elements of engineering and said that he stayed behind to help three of them. ‘She said I shouldn’t have done this,’ he recalls. ‘I said I had a soft spot for young black men because they are often from environmentally disadvantaged societies.‘"[1] This reads like admirable activism, the rare person who practices what they preach, and about as far from real racism as you can possibly get. If one is using a definition of "racism" that can be twisted into making this man's actions racist, then that definition should be discarded. I will note that some of his comments, mainly asking a woman if she was Jewish because he thought she was talented and was excited to potentially be meeting one of his heroes, does seem obtuse and perhaps deserving of a minor rebuke. But not being fired as a "potential racist", which essentially nukes his whole career. The BBC reports a single allegation that he said black students did not have it "in their DNA to do engineering"[2], but he flatly denies this. The allegation comes from a single person who could be lying or have misheard, and it goes so directly against the spirit of his other quite progressive comments that it's hard to believe he would have ever said that. About "declining to support partisan, an openly Marxist corporation", this is controversial and the import is highly disputed, so I will try to be very precise with my language. The common defense is that "the founders being Marxist doesn't mean that it's a Marxist movement", but this defense only works if you ignore the context. The context is this critique: "And one of the critiques that he shared–a loving critique, as I would want to point out, by the way–is that he was concerned or is concerned that there’s a lack of perhaps ideological direction in Black Lives Matter that would allow it to be, to fizzle out in, as he said, in comparison to Occupy Wall Street. As you advance in your own organization, as you all are headed to Cleveland to participate in this Black Lives Movement conference, how do you respond to that particular critique?" To which BLM founder Patrice Cullors responds, stating why she thinks that the BLM movement has the ideological direction to succeed: "Um, I think that the criticism is helpful. I also think that it might–. I think of a lot of things. The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives. And I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don’t believe it’s going to fizzle out. It just gets stronger, and we see it, right... We’re in a different set of circumstances, a different generation that–social media may feel like it’s diluting the larger ideological frame." [4] That is, BLM has adequate ideological direction because it's in a larger ideological frame. She makes it sound very much like that larger frame is the frame of Marxist ideology, but we don't have to agree on that. Now I was originally referring to the BLM corporation rather than the movement, but I have to be very precise with my language, and her interview was discussing the movement, not the corporation. I will bring the thread back now to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc., of which Patricia and Alicia are founders. Hopefully we can agree that the corporation itself is closely associated with Marxist ideology. We don't have to get into the complexities of the larger movement. The "declining to support" part comes from the Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's apparent endorsement of the BLM's more mainstream goals, but his refusal to endorse the BLM organization itself (the corporation) and its radical, ideologically-driven goals. (BLMGNF has since remove some of the more controversial goals from its website). "The CEO’s apparent redefinition of company culture felt personal, hinging on the pressure Armstrong felt from employees to say Black Lives Matter. They view the statement as moral, not political or activist. “A lot of people feel that saying Black lives matter is an ethical statement. They feel it should be an easy thing to say,” one engineer says. Armstrong said in June that he agreed with the statement, and that police brutality was a problem. But he wavered on whether a statement that included “Black Lives Matter” would mean endorsing BLM as an organization and set of policies, like defunding police."[4] This famously provoked Dick Costolo's thinly veiled threat that Armstrong would be shot in the (presumably Marxist) revolution.[5] (Sorry if you dislike the source, but the tweets have been deleted since and that source still has them). Armstrong was harshly criticized for his neutrality, with the more extreme non-violent responses reading like this "NEW: @Coinbase announces new commitment to a white supremacist workplace."[6]. It's interesting that a "committed white supremacist workplace" can be sympathetic to the wider BLM movement even while remaining politically neutral. I'll also note that BLMGNF receives allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars in donations (but I can't source exact numbers because it's not public) and funnels them to the Democratic Party through ActBlue[7]. An endorsement of BLMGNF constitutes at minimum an endorsement of the Democratic Party, and can easily be perceived as an endorsement of Marxist ideology. I think it goes without saying that a CEO should be able to remain politically neutral and not have to endorse a particular political party or ideology, whether directly or indirectly. But prominent, influential progressives apparently feel like neutral people should be slaughtered. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8544279/University-lecturer-73-sacked-telling-colleague-positive-stereotypes.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8544279/University-... [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560707/Lecturer-sacked-praising-Jewish-scientists-German-engineers-slams-woke-brigade.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560707/Lecturer-sa... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-53489171 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-53489171 [3] https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives [4] https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-political-speech-coinbase/ https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit... [5] https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/01/former-twitter-ceo-fantasizes-about-violent-revolution-assassinations/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/01/former-twitter-ceo-fant... [6] https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1310654284674015237 https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1310654284674015237 [7] https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019

by edbob 6y ago

deanCommie 6y ago

I completely agree with your first 2 paragraphs. People pretend like describing a person or action as racist (in the academic definition) is a non-judgemental callout of our society's continued opportunity for improvement. However they ignore (willfully) the automatic mob that will invariably form to not educate but to chastise the person into oblivion (and taking their livelyhood in process). I do think we need a better way to callout subtle and insidious racism in people's beliefs and actions but make it an educational opportunity for growth for the person and for society, not the instigation of a pile on. Having said that, your specific examples are really strange, and I'd like to dive into why. Please make sure you understand, I do not do this to indict you, or accuse you of anything remotely of racism yourself. But your choices of example are strange because unfortunately I do think they are generally associated with malicious racists who use them as cover to have subtle plausible deniability. > openly Marxist corporation Speaking of words completely devoid of technical meaning. Can you clarify what you mean by openly Marxist corporations or offer an example? Because, I'm going to be honest, 99% of the usage of this term online today is not treated respectfully by neutral parties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... > expressing admiration of Jewish accomplishments Jewish or Israeli? The context matters significantly. It's naive to not be hypervigilant about both positive and negative discussions of Israelis and Jews online. You have everything on the spectrum: You have fully well-intentioned supporters of Palestianians and Palestine. But you also have duplicitous conmen who use the support of Palestine as a cover for blatant anti-semitism. You have fully well-intentioned supporters of Jews and Israel. And you have duplicitous conmen who use the support of Jews and Israel as a cover for blatant islamophobia, or worse Christian Supremacy. (Evangelical Christians in the US are militantly pro-Israel not because they so love their Jewish bretheren or hate Muslims, but simply because Israel has prophetic meaning in Evangelical Christian expectations of the Apocalypse/Rapture). The problem is that while the majority of people hold neutral/centrist beliefs on Palestine and Israel, the extremists are overrepresented online. Most likely when people react negatively to concepts like "expressing admiration of Jewish accomplishments", they are reacting to those in context > or expressing sympathy for the plight of young black men, Again, this seemingly uncontroversial concept is completely weaponized online. White supremacists (actual ones) will openly proclaim their concern for the plight of young black men. And they'll say that nobody can take care of them better than other black folks. Which is why 1) They should stop killing each other in greater numbers than white police do, and 2) This is why we need segregation so that White society can take care of itself, and Black society can do so also. This follow up isn't always visible and isn't always revealed. It comes later once the person who is operating in bad faith has earned trust and credibility.

edbob 6y ago
> I do think we need a better way to callout subtle and insidious racism in people's beliefs and actions but make it an educational opportunity for growth for the person and for society, not the instigation of a pile on. Terms like "unconscious bias" and "cultural appropriation" are fine. They have clear meanings, and AFAICT the terms themselves are never in dispute. In my personal experience, racism is a Very Big Deal, like murder, and it seems fundamentally wrong to diminish the meaning of the word by applying it to subtle, unintentional acts with debatable implications. It's as if one were to use the word "systemic murder" to describe the inefficient (in one's opinion) allocation of resources in medical research, and then used that term to characterize an entire society as essentially murderous and fascist. It just does not compute, and I don't think it does any good to insist on such terminology when it inevitably causes the conversation to derail into semantic disputes. Then the terms become useless for evangelizing, but very useful as litmus tests to enforce political allegiances and attack heterodox and non-conformist thinking. I'm guessing that you were fine with my first two examples since you didn't point those out, so I'll just provide sources for the last three. (Two are combined). Note that I rarely view anything on social media, so I'm not in that conversation. My views are my own. If they seem to echo the "talking points" of someone I've never heard of or some organization that I don't pay attention to, that is a coincidence. HN is my biggest news source by far. If you should happen to find my views distasteful, I assure you that it is due to a vastly different perspective and not bad faith. The admiration of Jews had nothing to do with Israel or Christianity. (As you noted, that could have made it a terrible example). The English lecturer Stephen Lamonby was fired as a result of his admiration of Jewish academics, saying "I was excited to think she might be one of them – excited to meet a Jewish physicist, who had been my heroes since boyhood."[0] This is precisely the opposite of what I would consider racism. It gets more interesting in that he defended the progressive position that blacks are disadvantaged by society, and this was somehow twisted around to make him a "racist". Not only did he say this, but he's apparently devoted significant time to helping out in disadvantaged countries and while in the UK gave special help to overseas students, and was attacked as racist for this: "Mr Lamonby noted that some of the overseas students were struggling to grasp even the most basic elements of engineering and said that he stayed behind to help three of them. ‘She said I shouldn’t have done this,’ he recalls. ‘I said I had a soft spot for young black men because they are often from environmentally disadvantaged societies.‘"[1] This reads like admirable activism, the rare person who practices what they preach, and about as far from real racism as you can possibly get. If one is using a definition of "racism" that can be twisted into making this man's actions racist, then that definition should be discarded. I will note that some of his comments, mainly asking a woman if she was Jewish because he thought she was talented and was excited to potentially be meeting one of his heroes, does seem obtuse and perhaps deserving of a minor rebuke. But not being fired as a "potential racist", which essentially nukes his whole career. The BBC reports a single allegation that he said black students did not have it "in their DNA to do engineering"[2], but he flatly denies this. The allegation comes from a single person who could be lying or have misheard, and it goes so directly against the spirit of his other quite progressive comments that it's hard to believe he would have ever said that. About "declining to support partisan, an openly Marxist corporation", this is controversial and the import is highly disputed, so I will try to be very precise with my language. The common defense is that "the founders being Marxist doesn't mean that it's a Marxist movement", but this defense only works if you ignore the context. The context is this critique: "And one of the critiques that he shared–a loving critique, as I would want to point out, by the way–is that he was concerned or is concerned that there’s a lack of perhaps ideological direction in Black Lives Matter that would allow it to be, to fizzle out in, as he said, in comparison to Occupy Wall Street. As you advance in your own organization, as you all are headed to Cleveland to participate in this Black Lives Movement conference, how do you respond to that particular critique?" To which BLM founder Patrice Cullors responds, stating why she thinks that the BLM movement has the ideological direction to succeed: "Um, I think that the criticism is helpful. I also think that it might–. I think of a lot of things. The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives. And I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don’t believe it’s going to fizzle out. It just gets stronger, and we see it, right... We’re in a different set of circumstances, a different generation that–social media may feel like it’s diluting the larger ideological frame." [4] That is, BLM has adequate ideological direction because it's in a larger ideological frame. She makes it sound very much like that larger frame is the frame of Marxist ideology, but we don't have to agree on that. Now I was originally referring to the BLM corporation rather than the movement, but I have to be very precise with my language, and her interview was discussing the movement, not the corporation. I will bring the thread back now to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc., of which Patricia and Alicia are founders. Hopefully we can agree that the corporation itself is closely associated with Marxist ideology. We don't have to get into the complexities of the larger movement. The "declining to support" part comes from the Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's apparent endorsement of the BLM's more mainstream goals, but his refusal to endorse the BLM organization itself (the corporation) and its radical, ideologically-driven goals. (BLMGNF has since remove some of the more controversial goals from its website). "The CEO’s apparent redefinition of company culture felt personal, hinging on the pressure Armstrong felt from employees to say Black Lives Matter. They view the statement as moral, not political or activist. “A lot of people feel that saying Black lives matter is an ethical statement. They feel it should be an easy thing to say,” one engineer says. Armstrong said in June that he agreed with the statement, and that police brutality was a problem. But he wavered on whether a statement that included “Black Lives Matter” would mean endorsing BLM as an organization and set of policies, like defunding police."[4] This famously provoked Dick Costolo's thinly veiled threat that Armstrong would be shot in the (presumably Marxist) revolution.[5] (Sorry if you dislike the source, but the tweets have been deleted since and that source still has them). Armstrong was harshly criticized for his neutrality, with the more extreme non-violent responses reading like this "NEW: @Coinbase announces new commitment to a white supremacist workplace."[6]. It's interesting that a "committed white supremacist workplace" can be sympathetic to the wider BLM movement even while remaining politically neutral. I'll also note that BLMGNF receives allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars in donations (but I can't source exact numbers because it's not public) and funnels them to the Democratic Party through ActBlue[7]. An endorsement of BLMGNF constitutes at minimum an endorsement of the Democratic Party, and can easily be perceived as an endorsement of Marxist ideology. I think it goes without saying that a CEO should be able to remain politically neutral and not have to endorse a particular political party or ideology, whether directly or indirectly. But prominent, influential progressives apparently feel like neutral people should be slaughtered. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8544279/University-lecturer-73-sacked-telling-colleague-positive-stereotypes.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8544279/University-... [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560707/Lecturer-sacked-praising-Jewish-scientists-German-engineers-slams-woke-brigade.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560707/Lecturer-sa... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-53489171 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-53489171 [3] https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives [4] https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-political-speech-coinbase/ https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit... [5] https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/01/former-twitter-ceo-fantasizes-about-violent-revolution-assassinations/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/01/former-twitter-ceo-fant... [6] https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1310654284674015237 https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1310654284674015237 [7] https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019