I am in my mid-50s and over the last year, my late-20s daughter has moved back into our house after 4 years at an East Coast private university working on a Doctoral Degree, because of Covid.
This is her daily woke worship ritual:
1. Read, remember or discover something that someone said, did or thought (usually from some subreddit or another or some memory of how her mother or me treated her or one of her siblings).
2. Come upstairs from her basement bedroom, fuming.
3. Find her mother or me, or both.
4. Angrily describe the injustice to us.
5. Call the perpetrator (usually us or some other family member) some name: bigot, homophobe, racist, etc.
6. Be outraged until she discovers some other thing that upsets her.
Repeat for infinity.
There is no joy or humor in her life. But she has worshiped this way in our house for months. It is her ritual. Of course, nothing ever changes because that's not the point. The point is to be OUTRAGED.
I think this is what DeAngelo is doing. And everyone of her ilk. Don't resolve anything. Don't make progress. BE OUTRAGED!
If she does live on "indigenous land," can she point to the excavation site near her house where prehistoric fossils were found, akin to the Lucy site in Ethiopia?
Genius. Every time you win, a BIPOC person lectures you on white privilege and keeps your winnings.
When you get tired of gambling without reward, you can buy tickets to the entertainment shows. You can't actually see anything, you just buy the tickets.
For dinner, you can go to the all-they-can-eat buffet.
Of course, the whole complex is completely nonsmoking, for whites.
Found a trailer for DiAngelo's next book, where she warns of the supernatural racist horrors of living on indigenous land, and what will happen if white settlers do not repent of their, eh...settlery?
Does corporate media try to distract Americans with manufactured outrage while their lobbyists tell congress how to vote and the economic issues that are destroying Americans lives to profit only the rich?
Where does DiAngelo and those in the media that talk about her fit into that equation?
As Apple (and many other companies) has shown, if you wave a rainbow flag you can get away with anything. Biggest corporate tax evader on the planet? Check. Labor abuses including suicide nets? Check. Firing problematic employees (AGM) for crimethink? Check. Massively supporting Dr. Dre ('Bitches ain't shit, but hoes and tricks')? Check. Exploiting slave labor (Uighurs) while valiantly defending personal privacy? Check. Complete immunity from criticism by the likes of Robin DiAngelo? Check.
The obvious villain here is 'wokeness' that put identity politics ahead of all other issues.
Peter - Wokeness is not the villain. IT is is nothing but a ruse meant to distract partisan hacks on the left and the right.
Apple makes money paying lobbyists to write laws that allow then to legally avoid taxes.... And they can do that as long as fools like you care more about politicians that give a shit about WOKE than politicians that have the balls to fight APPLE and the others.
Sanders, Warren, AOC, Khanna, Porter and others have the courate go stand up to Apple but you HATE them all because the media you consume has you more focused on their views on WOKE than what they are actually fighting for...
I did some research into this. Warren (and to a lesser extent Bernie) have denounced Apple as a corporate tax evader. AOC has been notably silent about Apple (as best I can tell). Rep. Khanna really does have an opinion about Apple. Quote "Khanna loves Apple Park".
It's not really communism. Real communism died with the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of modern China (yes, N. Korea and Cuba are holdouts). Real communism would get plenty of push back from Apple and all of the other 'woke' corporations. The poison-de-jour is Cultural-Marxism, not economic-Marxism. For better or worse, CRT is a more recognized term for this insanity (vs. Cultural Marxism).
So high and mighty up there on that horse. I hope you don't own any Apple, Samsung or LG product. I hope you don't own a TV. I hope you don't own a laptop of any brand. Because if you do, you're buying things made in China. So you might want to give the whole "China is horrible" thing a rest unless you like being a complete hypocrite.
Please try to read my comment. I do argue that 'Apple is horrible', not that 'China is horrible'. Apple chooses what sort of relationship it has with China and Apple chooses very badly. Apple proudly proclaims how 'progressive' it is. How suicide nets and Uighur slavery fits into that is a tad unclear. Did I leave out the part about 'Bitches ain't shit, but hoes and tricks'? Very progressive.
Peter - The obvious villain here are voters that care more about WOKE issues than electing leaders like Sanders and Warren and AOC and Katie Porter and Rho Khana that are actually fighting companies like Apple about the real shit, like tax evasion and monopoly.
Apple truly does not care what side of WOKE you land on. Only that you hate leaders like the ones i mentioned because they don't care as much about WOKE shit as about stopping Apple from screwing us.
And you have fallen hook line and sinker for the trap
E. Warren tweeted "5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri". Of course, that was a pure lie. M. Brown was not murdered. He charged a police officer (after trying to steal the police officers gun) and died as a consequence. The bottom line is that Warren is quite willing to use 'woke' lies to advance her agenda.
Futuristic - Perhaps a chardonay instead. In any case anyone that gives a shit about WOKE, one way or the other, is being manipulated by the media so they focus on the irrelevant and ignore the policy issues that voters need to come together on to stop companies CEO's from screwing the rest of us.
If you care about how WOKE a leader is or is not before they get your vote the CORPORATE media has won. They truly do not care what side you fall on. As long as you are divided they win and you los
Historically, the traditional left has been hostile towards large (and small) corporations. However, the rise of 'wokeness' has put an end to all that. Just profess to believe in 'wokeness' and all is forgiven. At least the Catholic Church charged real money for indulgences. Now just saluting the rainbow flag (or hiring Robin DiAngelo) will suffice.
Perhaps that is true. But corporations would rather people like you invest your mind and energy in this kind of bullshit rather than seeing people like you organize around the policy issues that will stop those companies from screwing you to make their CEO richer.
Companies don't care what side you are on Woke or not Woke as long as you are divided and don't unite to fight your corporate overlord.
The corporate media does whatever it takes to make money. Period. The media is not our friends. Journalists are not our friends. The media would throw their own grandmothers under a bus to make a buck. But that's it. All that other stuff is just posturing. If the corporate media would make more money by supporting really nice things, they would. But the money is made on the right and left sides of the media promoting conflict and tribalism. They don't give a crap about "profiting only the rich", they only care about making money for themselves.
Bob - You are fooling yourself. These corporations are way smarter than you seem to realize. They do not CARE what side of the WOKE issue you land on. They ONLY care that it distracts you and divides you as a voter. Heads the win Tails they win. You lose.
The more passion you put into hating WOKE the more you convince yourself that you cant vote for leaders that are a true threat to these companies like Sanders, Warren, AOC, Porter, Kahn... These are leaders that you HATE and will never vote for because they dont give a shit about WOKE and are totally focused on stopping the policy that is making corportate leaders rich and screwing the rest of us.
And you have fallen for it hook line and sinker. Your not a contrarian, you are simply being used.
Don't laugh! As we type my local Chumash casino is stealing our ideas. “White Fragility” the musical. “White Fragility: An Evening of Pop Song Hits by Old White Men Who Hopelessly Tried to Sound Non-White.”
I have a bunch of teenage daughters who are all flirting with the social-media fueled addiction to the Daily Outrage On Behalf of the Marginalized drug. Their father and I do the best we can to gently discuss A. the profit motive in promoting outrage addiction and perspective distortion, B. the role in choosing one's attitude and what one chooses to dwell on in mental health, and C. intentionally choosing to run information through an intellectual and logical filter and not an emotional one. It's very difficult because any pushback these kids get, they just kafkatrap; their little smartphone friends triumphantly point out that their parents' differing perspectives is just SOLID PROOF of how OPPRESSION IS REAL and they are LITERALLY IN THE FIGHT OF THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR VERY SAFETY.
Other than keeping their younger siblings the hell off the internet until they have learned to think, I'm not sure what else to do, and I am worried that they will wind up like your daughter one of these days. And I am worried what that means for our family because I will not support or harbor an adult who chooses a brain-virus approach to life over reality and happiness.
"keeping their younger siblings the hell off the internet until they have learned to think"
There's a clue here. Doing my Clint in GRAN TORINO bit: one of the worrisome trends I have observed in under-30s on the internet is the lack of distinction between their internet persona and their real-life persona. When the commercial internet got going in the '90s, it was largely understood that everyone was goofing around and had a fake name, akin to "handles" on the CB radio of the '70s.
I take your point, I believe, but if anything I think first-person-shooter video games allow young men to blow off steam in a way that has no real-world consequences. I'm not of the Tipper Gore school that thinks TV, video games, or music "causes" violence.
I kind of agree with you on FPS. But in a game like GTA where you can set a hooker on fire instead of paying her, I dunno. That's blowing off steam? It seems like there should be some sort of line drawn, but where?
...I guess setting a virtual hooker on virtual fire in a video game is objectively less harmful than setting a real hooker on real fire in the real world? I dunno.
If there weren't a market for these types of video games, I don't think they would be doing a booming business.
You could also drive into Chinatown and start a firefight with the Tongs at will, or escape from police helicopters and tanks by driving through a car wash/paint shop in GTA. We don’t see those behaviors manifested with any sort of regularity (although I do notice a disturbing tendency amongst younger football fans to not understand that the game on TV is not like the one on Madden)
Shifting the focus to Tipper Gore and "causation" does not take the point. It's saying and implying things that I was not; it's Presidential Grade interview strategy.
Kurt - My sons played shooter games in high school. It drove me crazy. They got to college and the first time a girl made fund of guys in their dorm room paying video games they both dropped them like a hot potato. She did what i could not
The best thing to do for kids is to stay above it, not judge and keep your eyes on what they are doing. You dont have to control them because you can't but if you treat them with dignity they will let you know that the hell they are doing.
Was that before or after your stay on Easter Island? Of course, this could well be one of those dastardly "unintentional misinterpretations".
By the way, I think your mentioning of being in opposition to Tipper Gore's uninformed nonsense was and is relevant, and was responsive to what was being said herein at the time.
It occurred to me earlier that you might be interested, as well as many other Matt Taibbi subscribers here as well of course, in a very recently
published piece of very good news from the folks at The Grayzone.
Excising the cancer of social media would probably help, but it would also probably convince them that you're evil incarnate. I fear for what the world will look like when all of these developing minds that have been poisoned by behavior manipulation while stewing in toxic, negative sensationalism-for-profit are old enough to run the show. There really isn't much we can do about it, it seems. But as Wilfred Owen once said, "All a poet can do today is warn." Good luck to you and yours.
It's definitely easier said than done. If I could do it over again, I would have waited much longer to allow smartphones, and I would be stricter about their use. I would not allow social media. But it's constant trying to skate to where the puck is unless you deliberately construct, and zealously patrol, a mini society of like-minded families. No matter what you do your kids have to be plugged in and even if you ban Instagram or TikTok (easier said than done; kids are very clever about hiding their use of things they're not supposed to be doing) their friends just send whatever they want over approved channels. Hard to construct moats when the soccer team uses a Discord server to organize and all the kids in their drama group stay in touch via Snapchat and kids can even find ways to cyberbully each other in the Google Classroom they all were shoved into with covid. Try to keep them from staring at their phones or laptops all day, because if the device is in your hand you're going to give into the temptation to scroll for lazy entertainment and brain candy, and wow look, the school district has switched to digital textbooks. It's a digital occupation of our children's brains and short of saying "sorry, you're going to be the weird offline kid, get used to it" which is what we are doing with our youngest two, there is no real way to fight it at this point. Trying to wake up other parents to this but it's a slow process and they're all addicted to their phones too. (And I'm not blameless in this either. I should be doing work in the physical world right now but I've spent a lot of the day reading and responding to comments in my own version of digital outrage. *sheepish shrug*
I think finding some decent peers for your kids is huge. And if there aren't any, maybe consider moving. This is yet another reason I'm so glad I left California.
I mean really. You really ought not to shame parents like this with your comments. Interesting to note, however, that you do seem to have what must be a difficult infatuation with mommys and daddys, considering what a peach your's sowed and cultivated. Must've raised you in their spare time.
Shame is a powerful incentive and one that needs to be brought back into western society writ large. This parent seems to understand what is at stake and hopefully is taking the appropriate actions to save the minds of her children.
"Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal, exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war, and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after his death."
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Cool he made lieutenant.
I would think legally defined national boundaries might be a reasonable starting point, but once you get into the empire business shit starts getting weird.
Another factor if import: Who one is fighting at the moment.
Keep going back to The Sirens Of Titan...can't help but wonder if Branson and/or Bezos aren't secretly hoping to become Winston Niles Rumford. Not holding out hope for a "Church of God the Utterly Indifferent" any time soon, but...
By force of arms. One day, if we're visited by extra terrestrials, and they're as violent as the US has been (our military in action in 90% of some or all of the years since our creation), with their superior technology, this land will be theirs.
At that point, we will fully understand the term, "asymmetrical warfare."
https://bit.ly/3fUBy1z April 8, 2021, CityWatch, Hate Money Stalks America, by Richard Lee Abrams
The Wokers tend to hate capitalism even though they do not know i is any more than they know what socialism is. However, both the GOP traditional bigotry and the Dem Woker bigotry are profit driven. They epitomize the Cigarette Approach to Marketing -- that is, sell people something that will kill them by convincing that it makes them look cool
What good does it do to compare the GOP values of 40 years ago to the values of the Democrat Party today? Only one of them is currently destroying the country.
the workers know that they're being ground into nothing by capitalism and socialism isn't being so destructive to them. totally agree on the profit driven game of politics tricking people into thinking any part of the ruling class cares about them
If they provide you with new pronouns, you have lost. The chance of that happening with daughters is much higher than it is with boys. From what I can tell, dysphoria is just another way for young girls to say that they don't like their developing breasts.
When your daughter tells you to refer to her and they/them, it is a serious mindfuck. I could deal with rebellion, staying out too late or drugs but I am inherently incapable of understanding this. If you use the wrong pronoun, it is literally the worst thing ever... To ever happen to anyone. Ever.
Airily - As the father of 3 who also consume social media I would suggest something. Are you doing the same thing they are on social media and simply landing in a different spot? If you are then i would say you should stop blaming your kids.
People that learn about the world through social media are misinformed. PERIOD. Does not matter what side of the issues you are on you are misinformed. Chomsky's Propaganda Fraemework was created for TV and it has proven even more true with social media.
IF you pull your own head out of your own social media bubble you can start engaging with your kids like the ADULT. Instead of caring what their views are you can just talk to them and ask questions about their views and even find common ground. The more you dig into why someone who's views are formed by social media has come to their conclusions the less convinced they will be they are right. But you cant do that if you two have formed views that may be different but are equally misinformed.
No. You can’t compromise with communism which is all what you call “woke” is. The last thing a responsible parent should do is placate the immature and uneducated thoughts of an indoctrinated child.
You're not wrong, at all, but I'm not sure why you would assume I need to be told to get off social media. The closest I come is reading various Substacks.
I imagine it would take a massive deprogramming effort along the lines of deprogramming cult victims like we had a lot of in the 70’s. Extremely difficult process from what I have read about it. I have no clue how that could be scaled up especially when the authorities required to do so are the ones doing the brainwashing.
Another huge problem is the fact the people not allowing themselves to be brainwashed or too old to know better are slowly becoming demoralized according to the Commies’ plans. So we are all getting hit from both sides. I fear the only thing that will work is a right wing strong man taking power and forcing it which defeats the whole purpose. At least that is what history shows it takes.
Pierce- You are familiar with the term Psychological Projection right?
If not your should be.
Your opinions show an utter lack of critical thinking on your part (eg: is Trump lying about winning the election. or Did Trumps tax cuts pay for themselves)
You can’t even respond to easy questions like these with out showing your lack of critical thinking skills.
So you gave me my belly laugh today reading you voice your concern about “today’s” kids lacking critical thinking skills.
The biggest favour you could do for her is to set her free. That will reorder her priorities. You know, paying for shelter, food, transportation etc. Allowing this simply enables it.
The wild thing about this video is that it's green-screened in front of a drum set and amps in somebody's library. MTV had money to burn in the '80s. Where is rtj when we need her?
Jason - Setting her free because you are angry that she does not believe a set of lies you happen to believe is not assured of enabling her to "reorder her priorities". What is is assured of doing is creating a deeper rift between father and daughter.
Maybe she should be on her own and maybe she should not. Economic conditions have forced increasing numbers of 20 something educated children home with their parents. That is neither of their faults. But He does not give the evidence to answer that one way or the other. All he gives us evidence of is that BOTH and and his daughter are delusional because of the media they consume.
I don't think anyone can give him good advice based on his version of things. How about you?
I've got a young teen and tween who are both smart and academically oriented. Not everybody can go to Hillsdale, and they don't offer engineering. I would certainly be as proud of them if they wanted to go into the trades instead of going to university, but I don't think that's going to be a fit for either of them.
I'm hoping we'll see some entrepreneurship and creative destruction in the university sector. There are many parents who want better alternatives.
But everyone will pay the taxes and all will have education and medical. I'm reminded once again of something a man in Denmark (every year named the happiest country) said when someone asked him if he didn't mind paying those high taxes. He said, "No, I don't mind. I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country." How unlike a majority of US Americans. It states in the Preamble to the Constitution that the government's first duty is to the welfare of the people.
Most WOKE people are living on their own dime. Most Anti Woke people are living on their own dime.
What you are saying is that if your child does not agree with the set of LIES you beleive in then you should not support then right in the middle of a pandemic when more 20 somethings than ever are being forced to live at home.
I'm in my mid to late 50's and have children ranging in age from 30 to 18. Only 2 at home at this stage. I commend you patience. I have been known to suggest to my own children that if living with their parents is a hardship, they should move out quickly to lessen their own pain!!
It was 1972. I was 21 and just out of the Army. My father discovered my pipe and my weed and reminded me that it was his home and I was no longer a welcome guest. It was the best thing that ever happened to both of us.
I've noticed the same thing about people addicted to watching the news. I don't know if it's an adrenaline rush or something else, but there seems to be a psychological response to outrage that some people find intoxicating.
I'm curious, what degree is she studying for down in that basement?
Anger and fear make people more malleable, and therefore more easily controlled. It's most effective when both are induced, but in a pinch, either one will do.
Phil - So using your way of thinking you pay for your child's education they are then required to hold your same view of the world regarless of how moronic your view may be. Got it!
Another reason College should be funded by the government,
"So using your way of thinking you pay for your child's education they are then required to hold your same view of the world regarless (sic) of how moronic your view may be."
You could not be more wrong even if you tired twice as hard to fail as you already are.
Phil - Last time i checked paying for your kids COLLEGE does not make your political ideas CORRECT.... No more than getting your PHD makes your political ideas correct.
They BOTH sound like fools who have let corporate media misinform them both so much they are not divided. And that is the goal of corporate media. TO divide. Matt's book HATE INC.... is all about this.
This guy is a victim himself as is his daughter. Maybe he should clean up his own act and start being an ADULT before blasting his kid.
She's an arrogant, hyper-privileged, over-educated, ungrateful, spoiled, petulant, willfully-unemployed twit. And since her father facilitated her, including allowing her to move back home, guess what that makes him.
Phil - Corporate media has manipulated Americans into thinking their President was a foreign asset controlled by Putin and on the other side thinking a Presidential election was rigged.
Dividing this father and daughter on LIES and manipulation is just a manifestation of consuming media that is intentionally doin this to us.
Know your enemy. That guys daughter is not the enemy. She is the victim. But the real enemy, corporate media, has fools like you blaming the victim...
God they are good at what they do and you are the proof.
FNR - It is called being an adult not a child parent. Being just as MISINFORMED as his daughter and then angry at her is childish parenting.
It is called being an ADULT... He needs to let it go and soon she will to. If he is going put and lash out because she has not fallen for the bullshit right wing lies he has all he is doing is showing he is still a child in my view. Grow the F up and get over it.
Sadly, she is connected to the Social Umbilicus and being fed pure poison by algorithms which detect, predict and even direct her emotions for max-level advertising. It's evil, I tell you... but what can anyone do?
You can't MAKE an addict quit -they have to want to do it first and foremost.
We have an entire world full of people staring at screens and being manipulated 24/7.
Your fatherly anecdote "Woke Worship" is quite probably the most definitive, and insightful, description of this current "Woke" phenomenon that has infected the reasoning of so many in our society of most all ages. The form of intellectual impatience this behavior reflects has been evident for most of my life {79 years and counting}, most often by those who simply do not think before they speak or, in modern parlance, "tweet"/write. A common behavioral manifestation of this absence of forethought is, of course, too often being adamantly incorrect; while 'believing' their feigned "outrage" to be enlightened and reasonable.
Many years ago there was a wise saying that, I believe(?) described this modern behavior:
"MINDS IN NEUTRAL, FULL SPEED AHEAD!"
Here is another one, if you can't get them to stop it.
"If you don't leave me alone, I'll have to find someone who will!"
Ethan - "woke worship" is a line literally being fed to sheep that consume right wing propaganda... Matt is cashing in on people that consume propaganda and clearly you are one fo them.
He and his daughter are two sides of the same coin. Both equally misinformed. The fact that he is annoyed that his daughter does not share his idiotic ideas is more evidence parents should NOT be funding their kids education if in so doing they think their kids need to beleive their parents idiocy... Right?
Kosh - Woke is literally a made up corporate narrative to distract and divide voters so they don't come together and elect leaders that will change economic policy to help ordinary Americans if it will hurt corporate profits. They don't care what side of the debate Americans are on, only that Americans HATE elected leaders that are not on their side on this issue.
Matt flaming the fires of this because it ropes in people like you who know their economic policy ideas are moronic so you invest your passion in identity political ideas. Matt ropes you in and rings the cash register while holding on to his liberal creds... Right?
"Woke is literally a made up corporate narrative to distract and divide voters so they don't come together and elect leaders that will change economic policy to help ordinary Americans if it will hurt corporate profits."
how can you be able to understand this and at the same time NOT understand that it is also a danger, in and of itself?
if you were trying to escape a deadly maze and knew ahead of time that one corridor crowded with razor-sharp wire was intended to distract, is the razor-sharp wire not dangerous?
it's not hard to understand, unless you refuse to because what you are really trying to convey is something else. that kind of bullshit is easy to spot. seems like you are here to whine at people who do not agree with you and your newly acquired lefty kook mental disease.
FNR - I am not going to wrap my mind around WOKE any more than I am going to wrap my mind around how Trump is controlled by the Putin...
These are all just fantasy's manufactured like a reality TV show to distract you from how you are being screwed financially by the same politicians that side with you on WOKE this and WOKE that.
Stope being manipulated. Matt sucks people like you in with stories like this. Stop validating his strategy and start demanding that he focus on what he is REALLY REALLY good at which is exposing how corporate media is MANIPULATING you to help their corporate overlords.
Piketty doo doo - You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about! This may not be the ideal venue to test your language skills, at least until you actually learn the language du jour.
Heh Jeb...JEB...dammit Jeb awaken, I think thars a snake in yer britches.
Ethan- You are evidence that Matt's strategy is working. it brought in someone like you who is not used to having his ideas challenged much less with logic and facts that reveal weakness in your thinking.
Welcome to the big leagues. You going take your ball and run home to mommy crying or are you going to defend your views with stronger logic, more relevant evidence and more wisdom?
Yes, a parent who is misinformed about politics and then gets angry at his daughter because her misinformation is different than his is showing weak parenting. Even if he paid for her college tuition.
Thats a nasty thing to say. It's not parents' fault if their kid is going through a difficult time and processing it with some bizarre woke bullshit. Screw you.
Sevender, while you are in many ways not wrong, I'm interested in what solutions you have. You're all over this thread telling all these parents who woke up one day to realize their children had been replaced by SJW pod people, and there is no way to get the arrow out that doesn't cause further injury, that it's their fault because they're pussies and failures as parents. Ok fine. You're right. It's our fault and we fucked up. We lost our children to the Hitler Youth and it's all our fault because we had no idea that allowing them in 2013 to communicate with their peers in the socially expected fashion meant that years in the future those channels would be used to insert an ineradicable fungus into their brains. Now what? Since you are so certain that this is state of affairs is under the control of parents, what should those of us with young adults do now, and what should people reading this with toddlers who wish to avoid this situation do?
My suggestion is to learn everything you can about what this critical Social Justice ideology really is about. It ain't pretty, it's Orwellian as hell and has nothing whatsoever to do with Social or Justice
It's Anti-Social Injustice and it has to be stopped
I recommend this reference on what's afflicted your kids.
If you're not able to open this link, peruse other areas of the site
Or subscribe to support professor Lindsay's work
"Drawing from various examples in the neo-Marxist and Critical Pedagogy literature, in this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I make the case that Wokeness is applied psychopathology. That is, the point of a Critical Theory is to induce and groom psychopathologies that the activists can then manipulate to achieve their ends. Join me for a rather daring exploration of this idea."
If it means anything, I am sympathetic to your situation. You have given her every opportunity to succeed. The situation must be maddening. I would like to think that she will understand that later in life. My best to you and yours.
I don’t know if there is anything you can do when children are small to prevent them from turning into this years in the future (other than love and care for them while setting boundaries and giving them an appropriate amount of chores and consequences), but I know people whose children became drug addicts and were living at home as adults. Because the behavior was so extreme, these parents had to eventually tell their children that they were not welcome in the house anymore. The parents loved their children, but had to set boundaries about what behavior they would tolerate. So, the answer to your question is some form of “my house, my rules”. If it bothers them enough, the parents should tell their daughter to stop, and that if she doesn’t, she will have to live elsewhere. Like a drug addict, she may or may not recover, but the parents don’t have to tolerate her behavior in their house while she is active in her “addiction”.
"Terrible parents" is too harsh, but their current strategy isn't helping her. She's really too old--late twenties--to be acting like this. Can't she process her difficult time without tracking down her parents in the house and yelling at them? How is she going to handle the workplace?
Oh my gosh. Our own parents accepted us and what we said. We accept our children. These are not terrible parents. These are parents who realize life is more complicated than their daughter understands. And ALL parents who are kind and good reflect and are aware our children look at life in ways that our different from us and we understand and sort of smile and remember our youth. We all need to empathize and be amused and discuss without hatred or anger.
Lmao. We have two entire generations now of fat, depressed, socially anxious young people whose IQs are lower than their elders' for the first time since WWII. But you're all Perfect Parents!! LOL.
No, life is really pretty simple. Simple courtesy towards your parents and siblings for starters. These parents are doormats. If a sister of mine operated this way, I'd quickly cut her out of my life and my family's life. Zero tolerance for that kind of horseshit.
I gotta say something to support your statement. Princess is acting like a spoiled princess b/c Daddy & Mommy are (and have been) more interested in being her friend that being good parents. This bs from this kid didn't just magically appear; it's the culmination of years of habits and 'keeping the peace' instead of establishing boundaries. I have zero sympathy.
Snowflake is the mirror image of Archie Bunker. Daddy needs to be the mirror image of The Meathead. Oh, and my credentials are that I raised three daughters, okay?
And like other commenters, I'm curious as to her field of grad work. I'll put a plugged nickel on it ain't STEM! Obviously her behaviour reeks of Grievance studies, but that's too obvious. What is it? Hmmm???
Scott - I have had 3 20+yr old spawn living in the house. None of them agreed with me on politics. Did not bother me any more than my views bothered them. The older the get the more they end up thinking like me, but that is because they are out in the workforce crushing it. We are lucky few in this country moving forward and not one of us thinks it is because we are more brilliant or work harder than anyone. We just live in the right place at the right time and being swept forward by trends we did nothing to create. Just like the majority of Americans who are being swept down word (despite being smarter and working harder than us) by the trends they did noting to create.
We may not agree on politics but we agree that some places are economically better than others and people living in those places should appreciate their great fortune.
Man, my kid was spazzing out from the internet during Covid too. I went on walks with her to the park with our Dachshund until the gibberish stopped spewing forth from her mouth. It usually ended when she saw a duck or something.
Exercise is the best cure for all the bad feels, bro.
Gaga - I fear you have missed the central them from most of the "parents" on this board. What you have articulated is what any normal parent would do.
These "parents" think that if the dad is paying the bills his daughter is required to tell her dad his moronic ideas (mostly lies and fabrications) are absolutely brilliant and how much she adores the close attention he pays to every syllable uttered by Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson.
That seems to be the consensus on parenting on Matt's board. Right Matt?
For the infant they're enabling? It's a wonderful life. Every day is Christmas, her birthday and Juneteenth combined.
Recommendation: Tell her to believe whatever she wants. Tell her to behave like an adult or get out. Now she has something genuine about which to be enraged.
I don’t know. Being angry all the time is an awful way to live. You are right they need to cut off the financial support immediately. These adults need to live in the real world
Maybe move her out of the basement and into the attic? Make sure there is no WiFi up there. If she wants to stay make her go through every box and organize all the Christmas decorations and photos and Granny’s old chest of clothes and recipes. Let her rock in Granny’s rocker and peruse all the old books and Bibles and letters. When she has finished all that and written a 200 page paper about her experience then take her to the lake for a few weeks of camping with no WiFi.
Then help her move out. That oughta set her head on straight.
He and his daughter are two side of the same coin.... Both are being manipulated to insure the rich and powerful keep their power by dividing us. Father and daughter, conservative and liberal. Just keep voters divided and the rich keep getting richer at the expense of everyone else.
Sad to say, but many of her generation are clueless...and also helpless. Putting her out on her own wouldn't have the desired affect. She would more than likely end up in the arms of some nutcase like DiAngelo.
“I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making…”
When someone tells you they're incapable of self-awareness, believe them.
That quote struck me as well. There must be something wrong me. When I, a white guy, meet black people, I interact with them just as I do with other INDIVIDUALS.
My parents and grandparents were hardly on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement either, in terms of race relations, but being a normal, well-adjusted individual, I’ve managed to mature and raise a young man far superior to me without feeling the need to walk around self-flagellating for clicks and profit.
Ah but if you had been slow roasting your mind in collectivist doctrine and learning to view every micro-action and thought exclusively through the filter of racial dynamics whilst hardly ever meeting an actual living breathing black person....you might find it a lot harder to do that.
If she truly is non-racist, she would simply go to dinner with people of color and enjoy the evening with them talking about sports, family stuff, business, or anything else. Her selfinvolved need to talk about race shows her disregard for anything about the people except their color. That is the definition of racism. She needs to forget about “other white people” and focus on working on her own sad personality.
It seems like the people with her sort of mindset think by spouting off how woke they are they're good people and don't actually need to work to improve their personality, temperament, integrity, etc. I'd bet in her mind she considers herself fully evolved.
The excerpted anecdote was an attempt by DiAngelo to admit to her own problematic behavior. By criticizing her in an attempt to join this bandwagon here you accidentally agreed with her.
Erm..Her behaviour in the anecdote isnt 'problematic' its flat out loony toons absurd. It's like a cartoon skit of the most absurdly try-hard woke person who is so desperate to show a black person how non racist and right-on they are that they somehow end up spending the whole evening actually subjecting them to racist jokes and being incapable of talking to them as human beings.
What is a whole class of well-meaning people to do when they have everything and it's still not enough? Well, they join a cult - anything that will explain both their misery and their abundance. There is a reason why cults - from Charles Manson to EST to Nxium target the richest among us. And why people who struggle to put food on the table are less likely to fall for a charlton who promises them enlightenment.
I am 71 and all this CRT and wokeness and talk of being cis-gendered or whatever does have a feeling of cultness. Like the Emperor with no clothes and everyone in the crowd admiring how beautiful his clothes were, save one child who had the innocence of brutal truth to blurt out, “The Emperor has no clothes!”
The spell was broken as even the Emperor looked down and could see he was wearing no clothes.
I can understand how in the corporate world people who have spent decades of their lives trying to get to the top would “go along to get along” with this WF bullshit, but I think a cult is a cult and a bad fad is a bad fad.
Eventually (sooner rather than later I hope), the clear thinkers with eyes to see will come to the same conclusion as Rodney King did: “Can’t we all just get along?!”
Right, like when the In Crowd used to say how "beautiful" and "brave" Caitlyn Jenner is/was.
Um... Looks like Bruce Jenner with bad plastic surgery and fake tits. So... like every other Hollywood hag who's "been to the best". Jenner should have just fucking aged naturally and changed sexes. Nope... had to look like Michael Jackson.
I was a non-traditional college student (code for old-guy) that graduated in 2015. Many of the kids I went to class with had never skinned a knee, never bled, some had never experienced pain, and most had had a silver platter life. The anxiety level of these kids was palpable.
Great comment, but you may be a little generous with "well meaning." White, privileged DiAngelo fans live in safe, comfortable cocoons, but spout ideas that hurt poor people who pay the consequences. Insane ideas like "defund the police" don't come from poor minorities who have to put their kids in the bathtub when the bullets are spraying across the neighborhood. They come from the Robin DiAngelos and Lisa Benders (from Minneapolis City Council). Is that well meaning?
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Robin DiAngelo is a variant of Mad Cow Disease. I live in a small city with a lot of wealthy white liberals who love this Robin DiAngelo crap. It's just guilty white liberal masturbatory masochism. Back before the lockdown if I went to a dinner party I could be certain that one or more of the people at the table would gas on about how much they hated living in a place with so little diversity. I'd sit there thinking it wasn't like anyone forced them to live here. Much cheaper to live in Baltimore or Detroit or the South Side of Chicago. The head of our sweet little botanic garden got his board to read DiAngelo. Then they sent out an email about how racism would not be tolerated anymore at the garden. I asked them for a specific example of racism and they couldn't come up with any. But nonetheless they insisted white supremacy and white fragility are a serious threat. These people are sick in the head. White supremacy and fragility is not a problem. Mentally ill white liberals are the problem.
I don't think being totally out of touch is a mental illness. But yes, this cohort of totally out of touch people (not all of whom are white, btw) is a huge problem.
Thank you Matt. DiAngelo is an awful, self-loathing, condescending, race-baiting Marxist huckster. A good friend of mine, an educated man of color, asked me to read WF. I agreed. When it arrived, I took it on vacation to read on the beach. (white privilege alert!) After finishing the second chapter, I called him to verify that there wasn't some demented child abuse edition of the book that I may have ordered. He assured me that, that thought, was simply more evidence of my natural and incurable white racist behavior. I asked, "And that doesn't even feel, much less sound, racist to you?" The damage this woman has done on adults should be embarrassing to adults.
Hi Tedder130, I understand that one of the awful (and deadly) tenants of Marxism is to separate the classes. In DiAngelo's case, she specifically uses race as class. Another Marxist tenant is the elimination of the individual in favor of the "class". That's why I use the term Marxist. If you have a different or interesting perspective, I have an open mind.
You get a lot of Marx apologists in this audience. There are even outright communists in the comments sometimes that will deny the Uygher Muslim camps and that the Russians persecuted the Jews.
I agree with you completely. This is race communism, not unlike the Nazis. But people will make excuses for whatever reason.
There are a lot of smart people who are Marxist, communists, Buddhists, and so on. They point out that the so-called genocide of Uyghur Muslims is a propaganda ploy by the usual actors to manufacture consent for war on China. How is this even controversial?
Russians under the Czar persecuted Jews for many reasons. The USSR attempted to alter that practice, especially since many Party members were Jews. Nevertheless, there is a large Russian Jewish diaspora who will never forgive Russia for its past depredations.
And what in the world is "race communism"? The term itself is contradictory. It seems that due to over 100 years of elite propaganda, anything that is 'bad' is just called 'communist'.
I’m talking about someone who specifically called themselves a communist. Not a theoretical example.
There are actual videos of people being held for trains to these “re-education camps” and eye witness testimony of these horrible re-education camps.
But no one gives a shit about the story from this minority group as long as it defends communism.
Gross... at least be open- minded about shit. Sitting there denying these people a voice when there is a mountain of evidence about the atrocities of human rights by the CCP - a) what they did to the HK protestors, b) what they did to the Tibetan Monks, c) Tianemen Square, d) anti-suicide nets in Shenzhen China.
I am not the one to educate you about the CPC; you need to do so yourself. But I can point out that all propaganda contains a kernel of truth. The propagandist elaborates and expands and distorts that truth for the aims of the rulers--whoever they are.
For example, the reality of Xinjiang stems from a terrorist group, the Al Qaeda linked East Turkestan separatists--funded by the CIA/NED/USAID spooks, a real problem that the CPC is trying to solve without murdering the population (as the US has done in the Middle East). Do not take this 'genocide' nonsense for gospel. There are other stories for Tibet, Hong Kong, and so on than is presented in US mainstream media.
For symmetry, shall we discuss the children being held in cages while waiting for families who are ready to take them? Or how about the hideous statistics as to poverty, violence, maternal health and other indices of well being for our indigenous peoples? Something about "people who live in glass houses...." or "Let he who is without sin...." comes to mind.
Then let’s talk about how communism killed tens of millions of people and how race communism killed tens of millions of Jews in extermination camps. Would you be down with that discussion as well?
Communists did not kill tens of millions of people--you refer to Ukrainians. Stalin holds that agency--and Stalinism is not the same as Communism. You are stretching history and ideology to make such an absurd & offensive comment that "race communism killed tens of millions of Jews in extermination camps." Absurd.
I think of it more as needed context, needed because as Douglas Murray would ask… compared to what?
The Uygher Muslim camps and our immigrant processing holding centers have nothing in common. Nothing. I can’t believe allowing low iq or insincere posters to assert they do will convince anyone that parents sending their unaccompanied children, or dragging along their children to present for asylum consideration in our country is comparable to being imprisoned in a re-education camp.
And slavery/colonialism tends to be presented as a debt YT owes to the entire continent of Africa’s poor which is ahistorical and requires context, while American descendants of slaves have a legitimate claim for redress.
Ironically, their one asset, American citizenship bought by the slave labour and spilled blood over 400 years of their ancestors, is being bartered away to the world’s black and brown under some globalist vision.
So much time is spent trying to place a label, after which the engagement of ideas can end. If she’s just a marxist commie and he’s just a right wing nut job authoritarian - shrugs all around.
It’s a king of the hill displacement technique that totally avoids engagement with pragmatic issues of our country in my opinion by making the whole discussion a power struggle obsessed with skin melanin, profit to be made by the few, status quo for the many.
"You get a lot of Marx apologists in this audience." First, there numbers are less then the haters, so its really not that disproportionate, and Second many of us aren't really apologists in that we think he is right, we just think his ideas are being hugely exaggerated and misrepresented.
"There are even outright communists in the comments sometimes that will deny the Uygher Muslim camps and that the Russians persecuted the Jews." First, the Russian Programs before Communism killed more Jews then the ones following communism, so those terrible pogroms seems to be less the fault of communism and more the fault of pre-21st century Russian governments in general regardless of system. Second, while the suffering of Uygher Muslims is terrible I am not seeing anyone deny it nor do I really see how that is strictly communism's fault -- the big transnational companies that profit most from it like Apple could make it stop any time if they insisted their products not be made with slave labor, and instead they are the ones spending their capitalist resources to help this slavery continue: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/11/apple-continues-use-china-slave-labor-report-shows/
I abhor what is happening to the Uyghers, but just like the suffering of the Russian Jews I see no reason to believe it is strictly communisms fault and wouldn't be happening otherwise. This is especially as it is the most capitalist of the transnational companies propping this situation up and encouraging it meanwhile "communist" China is really mostly just communist in name only -- its really is just a party-aristocracy that regulates over what is otherwise just a free-enterprise society where and when it isn't actively regulating which is more than you seem to intimate. You can can call an A-bomb a banana but that doesn't make it true. China calls itself a communist country because it helps keep the uprisings down by claiming "yes this is a government and system designed for the people" then it is to admit "yah we hijacked and replaced what was intended to be that system with a vastly extra-cruel hybrid of aristocracy and the worst of free-market ideals" <- the optics on admitting that truth just wouldn't be very good or useful to the aristocratic rulers like Xi.
Frances knows not how to spell "good Uyghurs Moslems", mixes terms Russia and USSR, didn't notice that Russia stopped being Communist 30++ years ago, and has no feeling for the modern Warshaw Gheto -- the horror of open concentration camp, Gaza
I have not read Ms DiAngelo and I will not, so I don't know how she is using 'race' instead of 'class'. All I know is that her analysis, as shown by Matt, is in no way Marxist. First, Marx does not 'separate' the classes, he simply analyzes them for what they are. In this day, his thought about class is taken for granted. Second, I don't know what you mean by "elimination of the individual", except how neoliberalism exalts the individual in our modern days. None of this seems to have anything to do with DiAngelo's work.
What Mike means by "separate" the classes is to strictly divide the population into them, assume nobody can move between them and assume that their thoughts, wishes and behaviours can be trivially derived from which class they're in.
Marxism was never widely accepted, even in Marx's day, because it's patently nonsense. Capitalists work, but even if you consider their work to somehow not be labour, many capitalists are themselves former (e.g. factory floor) workers. Capitalists can also go back to being workers if their business goes under, so Marx's assumption that there's a bright line between these largely arbitrary classes is false. And people knew it was false back when he was promoting this idea.
Marxism is fundamentally a collectivist ideology that "eliminates the individual" insomuch as it assigns people beliefs and desires based on their "class" (which is itself assigned to them), and any objections by people who don't in fact think that way are not listened to but ignored or written off as "false consciousness".
Marx says little of what you seem to ascribe. He merely analyzes the reality of 19th century capitalism, adumbrating the rise of financial capitalism, and no one has really refuted his claims, least of all the libertarians you seem to favor. Marx is one of the major thinkers of the liberal project that began in the Enlightenment and his thought has had enormous impact on the world. As far as 'individualism v class', Marx's end state of communism is a classless society, very much like Jesus' kingdom of heavan.
Marx was indeed a major figure, but his "impact on the world is universally awful. And I don't know about libertarians, but his work has been thoroughly refuted by multiple other thinkers. He is definitely worth studying though
"What Mike means by "separate" the classes is to strictly divide the population into them, assume nobody can move between them and assume that their thoughts, wishes and behaviours can be trivially derived from which class they're in." -- this is absolutely hilarious. Typical conservative/libertarian numbskull grasp of Marx. diAngelo & her ilk have absolutely NOTHING whatsoever to do with marxism or socialism. Rightwingers just use those words in mindless kneejerk fashion. To observe & analyze the existence of different economic classes of people in the 19th century is to observe REALITY. Geezus, you people are dum.
I'm sorry but I don't understand your comment. Your first sentence states that you haven't and will not read DiAngelo, and your last sentence (assertion) seems to contradict that. Thanks for the civil exchange.
Should I have carefully explained that class refers to whether you have to sell your labor, and is not really a synonym for a classification? If we left something rich like 'Marx's Tenants' unmocked, what happens the next time they spout off?
Shhhh. This garbage and Kendi’s garbage and the indoctrination we see-it’s riddled with recycled Marxist garbage irrespective of your protests to the contrary.
Well, God forbid anybody should attempt to discuss Marx with any exactitude, or, for that matter, other religious figments like 'capitalism is given by God/Nature.' The whole discussion might fall apart and then we couldn't rant authoritatively about people in central Aasia we've never seen.
Come off as a jerk?!?! No, I'd say Cruella Snarcalita IS a jerk, and exactly the kind of person that ends up driving me away from forums like this. There are just too many Cruella Snarcalita's.
My typing inadequacies are duly noted. And, yes, I do read often. Why such an obnoxious comment? Is civil discourse that difficult for you? This thread is interesting with your contribution being an exception.
You really need to acquaint yourself with Marxism before you start reciting what you may have overheard at a party as the definitive analysis. In the first place, Marxism doesn't propose "separating the classes." Classes, by definition, are already separate. Marxism requests that members of the working class (the proletariat) become conscious of their existence within the class to which they already belong, and organize for their own liberation.
And as far as "elimination" goes, eliminating class *distinction* is the ultimate goal of communism, not melting into a state-worshipping mass. (That has much more in common with Nazism.)
That's circular logic: merely playing with words. It has no intellectual merit.
"Classes, by definition, are already separate". The critique of Marx is not that classes don't exist at all - that's a strawman argument you just invented - but that his assumption that there are bright dividing lines between them and that people are born into those classes. That belief is wrong. Because it's wrong, Marxism has to try and explain people's rejection of these wrong beliefs without admitting to their wrongness, hence the concept that the working classes are somehow "not conscious" of the fact that they're working class. Such drivel.
Also! There seems to be a common idea in some of these comments that Marx was correctly analyzing life in Victorian England. He was not, and had to rely constantly on fraudulent in practices in his written works to disguise that fact.
One of his favorite tricks was to rail against situations described in factory inspectorate reports, many of which were written decades before he cited them, whilst ignoring that those mill owners had already been prosecuted, or that factory safety laws had already been reformed by Parliament many years earlier. He had to ignore these facts, because his whole thesis was that capitalism could not reform itself and was going to self-destruct. He also liked to point almost exclusively at archaic nearly feudal "industries" as examples of what all of capitalism was like, whilst ignoring much better capitalised firms that had better conditions. This often proved the opposite of his case, because e.g. his criticism of small family baking firms boiled down to: conditions are bad because they lack sufficient capital to invest in machinery. In more advanced industries he struggled even harder to make his arguments work, like railways, where he was trying to argue that they were very dangerous and capitalist railways were killing more and more people, whereas in reality railways were rapidly becoming the safest mode of transport that existed.
In one notorious case, some other researchers who checked a quote attributed to a British prime minister by Marx discovered it was wholly fabricated and the PM had in fact said the opposite.
All of Marx is like this. His work isn't an intellectual nor cutting analysis of anything, it's just lots of academic jargon and deceptive claims, many of which fall apart when his citations are checked. The man contributed nothing of any intellectual merit to the world, and it betrays a deep malaise in society that so many people think he did.
""Classes, by definition, are already separate". The critique of Marx is not that classes don't exist at all ... but that his assumption that there are bright dividing lines between them and that people are born into those classes. That belief is wrong. "
A "class" you are born into is called a "caste". I am unaware of any writing by Marx that suggests that the capitalist, bourgeois, petit bourgeois or proletariat classes are permanent states of being for their constituent members.
"Because it's wrong, Marxism has to try and explain people's rejection of these wrong beliefs without admitting to their wrongness, hence the concept that the working classes are somehow "not conscious" of the fact that they're working class. Such drivel."
Merely claiming it is "drivel" does not make it so. In order for a class to be "conscious", it must be aware of its own circumstances, and its members must see the similarities they shares with other members of the same class who are otherwise kept distracted by things like racism.
So, for example, if people were raised since birth to believe that, upon entering the work force, they had a common interest with other people who share the same position in an industry (say, as assembly line workers), and have needs very distinct from their managers or the industry's owners, then you could say they were "conscious" of their place in the order of things, their "class". Instead, we are trained since birth to believe that we should have no solidarity with our fellow workers, and should instead embrace the capitalist perspective on work and reward. That is what it means for a class to be unconscious of itself.
The rest of what you said is just an attempt to "gotcha" Marx.
Pertinently, 'caste' is not the same as 'class'; the former is fixed, the latter is fluid. Caste seems much more to describe segregation while we know that there are many black capitalists. My 'perspective' is that it is just nonsense to portray any thought you don't like as 'Marxist'.
Good suggestion, I read "Caste", it's an honest look at the economic divide which is where our real problems lie, nothing like money or lack thereof to separate the people.
"Marxist" is just a synonym for "bad" or "makes me uncomfortable" for a lot of conservatives. DiAngelo's stuff is bad for enough reasons that nobody should need to invent new ones.
"Racist" is just a synonym for "bad" or "makes me uncomfortable" for a lot of lefties. DiAngelo's stuff is bad for enough reasons that nobody should need to invent new ones.
Lenin summarized the Marxist view of the world by saying that all of human history can be reduced to one question: "Who whom?" (Kto kogo.) Who is doing it to whom?
In other words, everything and everyone must be viewed through the lens of oppression.
In that sense, she is certainly Marxist, although a particularly low and vulgar kind.
This comment is why I like the comment sections of Matt's articles. I had never heard of this before and was able to verify it and learn something. Thanks.
If she has substituted 'class' with 'race' then she fails to understand either. There is nothing redeemable about her work, except perhaps in the minds of certain commenters to indulge in their obvious hatred of Marx.
The key architecture of Marxism is to divide the community up into distinct categories where membership is immutable, the groups are in perpetual conflict, and one of the groups is oppressing the others. The end game always results in the elimination of the 'oppressor,' group. CRT and DiAngelo adopt the Marxian architecture and simply swap race for economic position. While I don't know if DiAngelo is a Marxist, she is an absolute adherent of their basic ideological architecture.
All of "wokeness" is a derivative of Marxism by way of the Frankfurt School and other similar thinkers like Gramsci and Derrida and the various anti- and post-colonialist thinkers whose ideas depend on Lenin's (probably wrong) imperialism theory. That's how.
Except this is no longer true. The working class aren’t Democrats any longer, and communism for all the discussion here about it, is a dead philosophy.
I'm an educated man of color when I get a tan. If I were a "man of color" due to heredity I think I'd believe white people have gone completely insane. And I'd be right!
But I'd awkwardly smile and try not to say anything about it in public.
Seriously, to be a fly on a wall at an African-American barber shop these days . . . can you imagine?? What you would hear?? It would be hilarious and devastating at the same time.
White people were partly insane to begin with, but so are most people everywhere they form into groups.
A white woman who is by her own admission uncomfortable interacting with people from other races assumes all other white people share this trait (we don't), then constructs elaborates rules that she demands we all use in interactions with people who aren't white. Then she makes a ton of money at it.
A story: my partner is Latino and I am white. A few years ago, we went through a period where we were having focused weekly conversations about various issues in our relationship. One week, the issue we chose was "one of us is brown and one of us is white."
Afterwards, I told a progressive white friend about this, and her first reaction was: "Oh, that must have been so uncomfortable!" No, I told her, it was a Tuesday at our house. That was an easy conversation; sex, money and housework are the tough ones.
Fast forward a couple of years, and she's terminating my contract with an agency she works for because I'm not aligned enough with their woke agenda.
The problem isn't that progressives have taken over the conversation about race. The problem is that people who are uncomfortable talking about race have taken over the conversation about race.
One of the things that brings me here is that so many of the commenters sound like people I'd like to drink beer with. And a few of them sound like the people we'd complain about/ make fun of as we tippled.
"She fired me after she found out I'm gay and in an interracial relationship. She made a face when she found out and then she treated me badly for two years before getting my canned from a project."
I admit I have never read White Fragility. (Life is too short.) But this woman sounds like a horrible human being who, rather than simply admit she is a horrible human being, generalizes her horribleness to all those who look like her and now makes money on it. And she gets away with it because white liberals separate the chosen from the damned by level of guilt.
Another great article, Matt. Keep up the great work! Between you, Glenn and Bari I don't understand how more people aren't frightened by the direction the far left is taking the Democratic Party and how pseudo academic work is being socialized and taught like its peer reviewed scientific theory
Everyone who knows nothing about Bari should watch this before they decide to take this sockpuppet seriously. I don't particularly like or agree with Jimmy, but his comments on this interview are great:
I'm sure the burgeoning upper class Nazis went around handing out Mein Kampf, or its lesser-known sequel Mein Krampf: the story of Hitler's short but exuberant career in track and field.
Well of course none of them actually mean it in the sense of giving any of their money or advantages to those without (of any color), but some see through the bullshit but realize they have to parrot it anyway, and some actually believe the bullshit. That's the distinction I am making.
Large institutional investors--Vanguard, Fidelity, Blackrock--are pressuring corporations to hire Diversity & Inclusion officers. Woke ideology is a control mechanism, and it's not going away.
What is the reason that an investor would want companies they invest in to do this? I can think of lawsuit avoidance, or possibly boycott avoidance, but honestly, both of those seem like smaller risks than the amount of resources that DEI implies in additional staff and then just lost time for all of the existing staff when they're invited to mandatory meetings for DEI training. Am I missing the real reason?
My guess is it's not about mitigating risk or generating value; it's about political control. Last summer, we saw a whole lot of corporations line up very quickly in lockstep with the BLM movement. It was quite unprecedented--and a bit creepy, wasn't it? It was *not* just a marketing exercise either as many people argued. It's one thing to put a BLM logo on your advertisements, quite another to instruct employees to "be less white" in internal HR videos.
Basically, it is no longer okay for corporations to focus solely on maximizing profits. They must follow the edicts of their masters in Davos, and this is the mechanism for making that happen.
Agree, but there are many true believers in the ranks also. A fun if depressing game is reading the LinkedIn posts of my husband's colleagues and guessing which are obligatory yet fake prostrations toward the altar, and which are genuine expressions of religious fervor. The women in particular seem to really mean it, even hard charging CEOs whom you would expect to be a little more removed from full-bore participation in moral panics.
After World War II, scholars interviewed average Germans to see why they were attracted to Nazism in the first place. For some reason the men’s interviews have been translated into English and are available online but the women’s never were. I wonder why.
After the war the Allies interviewed average Germans to see what had attracted them to Nazism. Interestingly the Allies published translations of the men’s interviews but not the women’s. I’d be very curious.
There are lots of overpaid CEOs out there but if you think that they are making 500x more than they deserve then you do not have a proper understanding of economics, or maybe just math.
Share the link and people can get a teaser and then if they subscribe Matt can afford to live and write another day. I found this article via Twitter and subscribed. Not sure if you're implying it should be free in entirety, but I don't think artists and writers should give everything away.
As always, I already did that first thing - share the link on Twitter. No I am not implying Matt shouldn't have paid subscriptions. Occasionally Matt shares a whole column for free, by popular request.
Matt writes, "No: DiAngelo’s brand of bourgeois Spencerism is ascendant, tipsy with itself and encouraged now by a Republican backlash. At this point there’s nothing we can do but hang on and wait for the dinner to be over, and God knows how long that will take."
Jesus Christ no, Matt! Nihilistic passivity is not the answer. Standing up to these racist bullies and demanding an instantiation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream is the answer. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Let’s aggressively defend that ideal, not unproductively sneer from behind our computer screens.
Well, to be fair, Matt has written extensively and aggressively about this subject, to the point where many of his readers have been responding with "can we just ignore her and move on?" He's one of the more widely-read writers who's been consistently standing up to, and yes, "calling out," these bullies.
For real though, I have always believed in that dream for all of my fellow humans.
Just because people are becoming a Nazi mob that won't change. All of my dealings are above the board and fair to all, always.
There. I'm living proof that DiAngelo's premise is wrong. If I hadn't maintained my own individual integrity, I might have lost myself and not been able to be here to share this ideal with friends, strangers, my offspring, co-workers, the guy delivering sodas who did CPR while we raced to the convenience store on the "person not breathing call" -everyone. Even the person who wasn't breathing.
It's more simple than anyone makes it out to be, and the secret lies in being present in the moment. Really present. Entirely so.
Popcult has to work itself out in its own way. We who are smart have not solved the problem. Now another kind of people are going to have their shot. It won't be nice, it won't be intelligent, it may lead to all kinds of grief, but by God, when the Lawd gets ready, you got to move. In this case the Lawd being the _vox_populi_.
I am reminded to the sort of evangelist preacher who rails relentlessly on in detail about the struggle against the temptations of homosexuality. I think at this point, people recognize that they are describing their own inner demons as if everyone had those urges, thereby revealing themselves. DiAngelo does the same thing with racism, but with even less self-awareness.
DiAngelo writing in painful, cringeworthy detail about the dinner party incident reminds me of a former Episcopal priest I know, defrocked for having a mutually adulterous sexual relationship with a parishioner, who maintains a blog where she writes in detail about the relationship and its fallout despite the fact that it happened decades ago. Supposedly this is part of repentance and truth telling and responsibility taking, but it sure comes across as her savoring the memories and sucking on the bones as long as possible for whatever weird kicks she gets from it.
I agree with the consensus that DiAngelo is cashing in, but I think she's also rubbing herself where it feels good, too, and that's entirely what her tribe of followers is doing as well. Sick shit.
Pointing out that DiAngelo is racist and dumb isn’t going to cut it. We need to be educating people about the origins of critical race theory, which is a fusion of the ideas of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists like Foucault. Only when we have a macrocosmic view of all these ideologies, which have destroyed the American humanities and most of American culture and art, can we repair the damage.
You won't get most of the public to care in the slightest about the origins of this hacky huckster crap. Much easier just to say, when people start going on about "white people this, white people that," that they're being RACIST and to SHUT THE FUCK UP. That would cure this whole raging brain fluke viral contagion a lot quicker than trying to explain to people why Foucault was a raving sadomasochistic lunatic.
You couldn’t be more wrong. That’s what the PC left is doing right now — telling people not to ask questions and have conversations, but rather to just shut the fuck up. People need to be convinced through reason. The solution to a witch hunt is not another witch hunt.
You can't reason people out of opinions they weren't reasoned into. This is a terrible downward spiral. I also don't want a "shut the fuck up/no YOU shut the fuck up" society, but what's to be done about it? The last 18 months have made it crystal clear that most people, even smart ones, hold the views they do not from logic and reason (because those are specific skills which must be deliberately acquired and by and large are no longer taught) but from raw emotion and social pressure. I don't know what to do other than do the best we can to teach our children to reason properly and do the best we can to behave with intellectual integrity, while acknowledging that we do not control the larger context we find ourselves in.
That’s self-pitying nihilism and I have no time for it. If your local school board announces plans to start teaching white kids they have been born with original sin and black kids that they can’t succeed in this country, flood the meeting with sensible parents disclaiming this neo-racism with reason and evidence. If your Congressperson starts talking about their intersectional privilege, attend one of their community meetings and tell them on a livestream how that kind of thinking deprives people of their individual identity and entrenches, rather than diminishes, racism.
I am not feeling sorry for myself, just discussing reality as I see it. How's your campaign to convince people they're wrong and you're right going? In my life experience that has not ever worked, once, including situations where people can agree on rules of logic and reason. Situations where people believe what they believe because of how they feel: I'm sorry; it's literally impossible to change their minds.
Sure you can fight back, and should, against school boards and woke trainings at work, etc. But all you're doing is galvanizing those who agree with you, and maybe maneuvering out a victory. I'm all for that, but don't kid yourself: you're not going to convince any True Believers that they are wrong. Ever.
More nihilism. Dislodging stupid institutionalized ideas takes time. As to how it’s going, both Chris Rock and Charles Barkley have both recently disowned cancel culture. I’d say it’s progressing.
I think you can draw a line between curriculi that personalize and/or essentialize the concept of racial differences (ie worksheets telling kids to "list ways in which you benefit from or are hurt by whiteness), vs curriculi that merely talk more about the history of racism in America. A lot of parents want CRT because they think it's the latter, but can be moved against the former provided the criticism is not coming from a right wing source.
Last thing we need is a epistemological study of Foucault and others. Maybe shut the fuck up is a bit harsh but not that far off. People need to be extricated from this cult with common sense and reason.
Foucault is being taught in American universities across the country. He needs to be widely unmasked as the paltry scholar and intellectual fraud he was.
If we don’t attack the intellectual arguments, the true believers will say, "You just haven’t read Foucault and Robin Diangelo. You need to read the smart people and get smart like me." If we aren’t able to explain why those so-called smart people weren’t smart at all, we’re screwed, ‘cause their explanation will always be that these postmodernist and neo-Marxist "geniuses" are simply over our heads.
If you want to appeal to homespun common sense, go for it. That may work on some people. I am for deploying every weapon we have against these pseudo-intellectual bigots.
Foucault and Robin diAngelo have nothing to do with each other. If Foucault was exhumed from his grave and forced to read White Fragility, he'd instantly throw up. And then point out how it was another example of how the confessional mode of discourse serves as a method of social control.
Foucault was an anti-science, lunatic subjectivist who insisted the Holocaust was caused by the Enlightenment. He insisted that objective reality was unknowable, and reduced all of science to his concept of "biopower" in which things like special relativity are in fact just means of oppressing some and benefitting others with no relation to external, empirically discernible reality. Critical race theory, queer theory and postcolonial theory are saturated in references to Foucault.
Foucault’s entire corpus is drenched in subjectivist power conspiracies. Nothing means anything and objective reality is unknowable, but one thing that is certain is oppressive power forces are everywhere and only you the individual can see them, according to Foucault. Leading critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work is full of Foucault citations.
He also went to his grave in 1984 insisting that AIDS, the virus that killed him, was a social construct. How identifying a virus which mowed down gay men like flies as a social construct, and how demeaning the scientific method which was responsible for the development of anti-retroviral drugs which saved countless gay men’s lives, you’ll have to explain to me.
You should listen to Noam Chomsky’s views on the effect Foucault and postmodernism have had on people in the developing world seeking to cast off the yoke of colonial oppression. It’s difficult to achieve liberation when you’re told liberation is like everything else an illusion and nothing means anything.
Gloria Steinem has also called out the disastrous effect Foucault and the postmodernists have had on the fight for women’s equality and women’s studies, which under his influence has busied itself with pretentious, nonsensical word games rather than rigorous scholarship concerned with bettering the lot of women.
If you read Jose Guilherme Merquior’s magisterial 1985 review of Foucault’s entire corpus, “Foucault,” you’ll see he had absolutely no competence as a historiographer and that not one word in his books can be trusted.
Well 'bout time we got a smart guy on the job. Deployin' some of that there weaponry and showin' us why all them so-called smart people ain't that smart at all. Start with that foucault feller. I hear he's a Frenchman. That right there oughta tell ya he's someone that's always lookin' 'round the room, commencin' to start puttin' on airs! Reckon a smart guy like you could bring down a so-called smart guy like that a peg or two. Homespun common sense is fine with me, I ain't particular one way 'nuther---any which way you's fixin' to lay into them pseudo-intellectual bigots fine with me, fine with me.
There is no witch to hunt. I am just beyond sick of hearing white people being put down morning, noon and night. See, all this 'explain the roots of Foucault discourse' crap works on the educated middle classes, if they even care - and a good section of them won't anyway - but the working classes rightly don't give a damn about this polysyllabic crap. Allowing that there is some sort of 'debate' on this shit, like the nutters like DiAngelo have anything to say of any use to humanity whatsoever, just gives it oxygen.
I understand implicitly what the censorious ostensible 'left' have been doing recently to shut people up under the guise of 'extremism' after the Capitol debacle. But anybody who cares enough to research the subject knows where the roots of this psychotic discourse lie in universities, French nihilism, blah blah blah. Make the masses care about that. Or tell some racist fuck to shut up when they start spewing race hate. Know which way I would go.
Working-class people have brains and intellectual curiosity like anyone else. It’s clear you think the solution is shouting at and shaming people, and it’s clear I’m not going to change your mind. Have an amazing day.
Well aware of what working class people think. Working class myself. Which is why I am pointing out that these middle class parlour games will not work with the working class. They are not educated or skilled in them and, quite frankly, have other things to do, like making a living, than talking about dead French philosophers.
Yeah, but it would sure be fun to tell them to shut the fuck up. Or, they could all just spend 10 minutes with me in a small locked room and I could provide some old fashioned therapy.
One could walk away and say, "Sorry. I'll have to get back to you on that." That is harder to do, however, in an employer mandated training session. I doubt many people believe this stuff, particularly the way it is packaged by obvious poltroons like DiAngelo. You would have to be deep into a rather dim Human Resources cult to think this is valuable. Contempt is a difficult attitude to channel. Back in high school we used to mock nonsense by going over the top in our participation.
eek! You are right. I used the wrong descriptive term of abuse. I meant "nincompoop". Thanks for straightening me out. It is always important for invective to be on the proper vector.
Don't blame Foucault for any of this! Foucault wrote over and over again about the folly of categorizing people into rigid groups and how doing so allows authoritarians to institute control over more and more of our personal lives. He was dead set against biological essentialism, even in its apparently benign forms. I would argue that reading Foucault's writings on the histories of our concepts of mental illness and sexual orientation, and doing a similar deconstruction of our concept of race, would go a long way toward countering diAngeloism. As a matter of fact several books exist doing just that: "The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter and "The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W Allen both come to mind.
Foucault was an anti-science, lunatic subjectivist who insisted the Holocaust was caused by the Enlightenment. He insisted that objective reality was unknowable, and reduced all of science to his concept of "biopower" in which things like special relativity are in fact just means of oppressing some and benefitting others with no relation to external, empirically discernible reality. Critical race theory, queer theory and postcolonial theory are saturated in references to Foucault.
He also went to his grave in 1984 insisting that AIDS, the virus that killed him, was a social construct. How identifying a virus which mowed down gay men like flies as a social construct, and how demeaning the scientific method which was responsible for the development of anti-retroviral drugs which saved countless gay men’s lives, you’ll have to explain to me.
You should listen to Noam Chomsky’s views on the effect Foucault and postmodernism have had on people in the developing world seeking to cast off the yoke of colonial oppression. It’s difficult to achieve liberation when you’re told liberation is like everything else an illusion and nothing means anything.
Gloria Steinem has also called out the disastrous effect Foucault and the postmodernists have had on the fight for women’s equality and women’s studies, which under his influence has busied itself with pretentious, nonsensical word games rather than rigorous scholarship concerned with bettering the lot of women.
If you read Jose Guilherme Merquior’s magisterial 1985 review of Foucault’s entire corpus, “Foucault,” you’ll see he had absolutely no competence as a historiographer and that not one word in his books can be trusted.
I have found Foucault's concept of biopolitics to be very helpful in explaining to lefty college graduates why the very real abuses done in the name of covid19, as well as the very real abuses done to those labeled "lunatics", are actually bad. He was very sensitive to the ways in which blind worship of "science" (which is constantly evolving--"race science" was quite mainstream in the 1920s-1930s) can lead to mass violations of human rights.
Foucault’s antidote to bad science was epistemological, nihilistic anti-science couched in deliberately inchoate prose. "Nothing means anything and nothing is knowable" is a bland, unsustainable conclusion.
The correct antidote to bad science is good science.
Not every concept in postmodernism isn’t without some truth; it’s just that the handful of concepts that are valid have been lifted from infinitely more insightful writers like Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Friedrich Nietzshe. They offer an enriching read; Foucault’s writing is 90% bullshit and thereby does not.
It's not quite as simple as "bad science" vs "good science". For instance: at what level of viral virulence/deadliness is it acceptable to shut down an entire society? That's not a scientific decision but a moral one. Should medical treatments be forced on people, and if so, what circumstances would make that acceptable? Again, not a scientific question but a moral one, and one that cannot ethically be answered without the input of those who would have the treatment forced on them. We have witnessed politicians repeatedly delegate this moral decisionmaking to "medical experts" and pretend their tyranny is just about "following good science". Any philosopher who can point out the folly of this type of thinking is very valuable to those who care about human freedom.
Foucault had zero concern for human freedom or any other moral, concrete ideal. He was a shameless sophist whose only talent was for self-promotion. He had no clear answers for the highly relevant ethical questions you pose.
I find the modern self-loathing, self-flagellating white liberal guilt in America to be deeply, deeply troubling. It's coming from people who increasingly seem to be unhinged. Their whole 'born with the Original Sin of being white and thus worthless' schtick seems to me to be nothing more than a contemporary manifestation of the whole post-slavery notion that there will be a revenge race war in America, and the white folks are going to get murdered when it comes. Charles Manson preyed on the same crap in his own wee cult world.
Reading a grovelling, pandering, pathetic book by some mentally unbalanced snake oil saleswoman (she comes from a fucked-up background) won't save you from a never-coming race hate bullet, penitent and fearful whitey, trust me. Ironically, the anti-white racism that filth like this worthless book is perpetuating is starting to have real-world ramifications in race relations, allowing anti-white sentiment to be spoken much more freely, and this, in turn, ratchets up the race-revenge-based paranoia of the people who read this shit to 'absolve' themselves in the first place. What a finger-licking-good Kentucky Fried cluster fuck.
Unfortunately, this race hate contagion has infected the UK. A top-selling book on this increasingly race-fractured, fractious island (we always take our lead from across the Atlantic) recently was Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by a middle class black English writer named Reni Eddo-Lodge. I read as much of this race-hate-cum-anti-white-apologist book as I could. Ms. Eddo-Lodge posited in the text that the reason that Asian grooming gangs in the UK had picked on mostly white girls was because they had absorbed Western beauty standards, were brainwashed into finding white girls more attractive than brown-skinned girls, and thus raped vulnerable teens accordingly! At that point I roared and threw the fucking book across the room, for obvious reasons. I have no desire to read the twisted-mind ravings of a racist lunatic, no matter how critically feted she may be by fawning Guardian-reading, self-loathing sniffy liberal types.
All this racism, more and more pointed towards white people these days, is just divide-and-conquer swill, to give people a bogeyman (black or white) at different-coloured eye level to rail against, instead of looking up at the elites slowly and joyously strangling us all and fighting back against them. Idiots like Eddo-Lodge and DiAngelo make a bad sociological situation much, much worse, whether by accident or by design. And I don't know or care which one of these it is anymore. There's money in them thar race hate peddling. Sick of it all, top to toe, dick to dorsal.
Look at this woman's Wiki page photo. Note the cracks in the white paint in the background. It's like a naked representation of her psyche. She just looks plain nuts. Would you buy a used race hate ideology from this woman?
Woke worship!
I am in my mid-50s and over the last year, my late-20s daughter has moved back into our house after 4 years at an East Coast private university working on a Doctoral Degree, because of Covid.
This is her daily woke worship ritual:
1. Read, remember or discover something that someone said, did or thought (usually from some subreddit or another or some memory of how her mother or me treated her or one of her siblings).
2. Come upstairs from her basement bedroom, fuming.
3. Find her mother or me, or both.
4. Angrily describe the injustice to us.
5. Call the perpetrator (usually us or some other family member) some name: bigot, homophobe, racist, etc.
6. Be outraged until she discovers some other thing that upsets her.
Repeat for infinity.
There is no joy or humor in her life. But she has worshiped this way in our house for months. It is her ritual. Of course, nothing ever changes because that's not the point. The point is to be OUTRAGED.
I think this is what DeAngelo is doing. And everyone of her ilk. Don't resolve anything. Don't make progress. BE OUTRAGED!
Tell her she should move out of your basement because she lives on what used to be indigenous land.
DiAngelo notes she lives on indigenous land in her book
I would say more that she lives - and writes - on disingenuous land.
Very nice!!
Give it all back to the dinosaurs
40 acres and a triceratops?
Godzilla will soon come to collect!
That's "Gojira" to you.
Heh, yep, nice! Cue up the Blue Oyster Cult!
Welcome to Jurassic Park!
Indeed. But did she give her property back to the natives along with all of her money?
If she does live on "indigenous land," can she point to the excavation site near her house where prehistoric fossils were found, akin to the Lucy site in Ethiopia?
Helpful note for her: All land is indigenous land - be it in Europe, Asia or the Americas. I guess she could move to Antarctica -maybe?
You damned...Polar bearist...you! White bear fragility!
I think you meant penguinist?
No, don't be so sanguine, penguin-fetishist.
Maybe DiAngelo should build a casino and then write about how the indigenous people are being oppressed by lending their tribal names to casinos.
Genius. Every time you win, a BIPOC person lectures you on white privilege and keeps your winnings.
When you get tired of gambling without reward, you can buy tickets to the entertainment shows. You can't actually see anything, you just buy the tickets.
For dinner, you can go to the all-they-can-eat buffet.
Of course, the whole complex is completely nonsmoking, for whites.
Heads, she wins; Tails, you lose.
She might move to Canada and write about Native Canadians next....
Found a trailer for DiAngelo's next book, where she warns of the supernatural racist horrors of living on indigenous land, and what will happen if white settlers do not repent of their, eh...settlery?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eZgEKjYJqA
Of course she does. I wonder if she is this much of a cartoon in her actual personal life. Yikes.
She has skillfully made herself unparody-able because there is no room left to exaggerate.
She is. Have you watched the Evergreen College fiasco documentary on Brett Weinstein's dismissal? She has a cameo and it's quite something.
Does corporate media try to distract Americans with manufactured outrage while their lobbyists tell congress how to vote and the economic issues that are destroying Americans lives to profit only the rich?
Where does DiAngelo and those in the media that talk about her fit into that equation?
As Apple (and many other companies) has shown, if you wave a rainbow flag you can get away with anything. Biggest corporate tax evader on the planet? Check. Labor abuses including suicide nets? Check. Firing problematic employees (AGM) for crimethink? Check. Massively supporting Dr. Dre ('Bitches ain't shit, but hoes and tricks')? Check. Exploiting slave labor (Uighurs) while valiantly defending personal privacy? Check. Complete immunity from criticism by the likes of Robin DiAngelo? Check.
The obvious villain here is 'wokeness' that put identity politics ahead of all other issues.
Peter - Wokeness is not the villain. IT is is nothing but a ruse meant to distract partisan hacks on the left and the right.
Apple makes money paying lobbyists to write laws that allow then to legally avoid taxes.... And they can do that as long as fools like you care more about politicians that give a shit about WOKE than politicians that have the balls to fight APPLE and the others.
Sanders, Warren, AOC, Khanna, Porter and others have the courate go stand up to Apple but you HATE them all because the media you consume has you more focused on their views on WOKE than what they are actually fighting for...
YOu are the problem, not WOKE
Do you know how stupid you look shilling the same campaign message over and over again?
I did some research into this. Warren (and to a lesser extent Bernie) have denounced Apple as a corporate tax evader. AOC has been notably silent about Apple (as best I can tell). Rep. Khanna really does have an opinion about Apple. Quote "Khanna loves Apple Park".
How does Apple not paying taxes harm anyone? Sure, it’s hypocritical and dishonest, but taxation is theft.
Just call it what it really is. Communism.
It's not really communism. Real communism died with the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of modern China (yes, N. Korea and Cuba are holdouts). Real communism would get plenty of push back from Apple and all of the other 'woke' corporations. The poison-de-jour is Cultural-Marxism, not economic-Marxism. For better or worse, CRT is a more recognized term for this insanity (vs. Cultural Marxism).
So high and mighty up there on that horse. I hope you don't own any Apple, Samsung or LG product. I hope you don't own a TV. I hope you don't own a laptop of any brand. Because if you do, you're buying things made in China. So you might want to give the whole "China is horrible" thing a rest unless you like being a complete hypocrite.
Please try to read my comment. I do argue that 'Apple is horrible', not that 'China is horrible'. Apple chooses what sort of relationship it has with China and Apple chooses very badly. Apple proudly proclaims how 'progressive' it is. How suicide nets and Uighur slavery fits into that is a tad unclear. Did I leave out the part about 'Bitches ain't shit, but hoes and tricks'? Very progressive.
Peter - The obvious villain here are voters that care more about WOKE issues than electing leaders like Sanders and Warren and AOC and Katie Porter and Rho Khana that are actually fighting companies like Apple about the real shit, like tax evasion and monopoly.
Apple truly does not care what side of WOKE you land on. Only that you hate leaders like the ones i mentioned because they don't care as much about WOKE shit as about stopping Apple from screwing us.
And you have fallen hook line and sinker for the trap
Please provide a source for any time the politicians you cited have denounced CRT. I’ll wait.
E. Warren tweeted "5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri". Of course, that was a pure lie. M. Brown was not murdered. He charged a police officer (after trying to steal the police officers gun) and died as a consequence. The bottom line is that Warren is quite willing to use 'woke' lies to advance her agenda.
Somebody’s obsessing on corporate media this fine morning. Have a beer, Piketty. Life’s too short...
Futuristic - Perhaps a chardonay instead. In any case anyone that gives a shit about WOKE, one way or the other, is being manipulated by the media so they focus on the irrelevant and ignore the policy issues that voters need to come together on to stop companies CEO's from screwing the rest of us.
If you care about how WOKE a leader is or is not before they get your vote the CORPORATE media has won. They truly do not care what side you fall on. As long as you are divided they win and you los
Historically, the traditional left has been hostile towards large (and small) corporations. However, the rise of 'wokeness' has put an end to all that. Just profess to believe in 'wokeness' and all is forgiven. At least the Catholic Church charged real money for indulgences. Now just saluting the rainbow flag (or hiring Robin DiAngelo) will suffice.
Perhaps that is true. But corporations would rather people like you invest your mind and energy in this kind of bullshit rather than seeing people like you organize around the policy issues that will stop those companies from screwing you to make their CEO richer.
Companies don't care what side you are on Woke or not Woke as long as you are divided and don't unite to fight your corporate overlord.
The corporate media does whatever it takes to make money. Period. The media is not our friends. Journalists are not our friends. The media would throw their own grandmothers under a bus to make a buck. But that's it. All that other stuff is just posturing. If the corporate media would make more money by supporting really nice things, they would. But the money is made on the right and left sides of the media promoting conflict and tribalism. They don't give a crap about "profiting only the rich", they only care about making money for themselves.
Bob - You are fooling yourself. These corporations are way smarter than you seem to realize. They do not CARE what side of the WOKE issue you land on. They ONLY care that it distracts you and divides you as a voter. Heads the win Tails they win. You lose.
The more passion you put into hating WOKE the more you convince yourself that you cant vote for leaders that are a true threat to these companies like Sanders, Warren, AOC, Porter, Kahn... These are leaders that you HATE and will never vote for because they dont give a shit about WOKE and are totally focused on stopping the policy that is making corportate leaders rich and screwing the rest of us.
And you have fallen for it hook line and sinker. Your not a contrarian, you are simply being used.
Well Matt, at least she is pitching her screed to her Indigenous patronage.(;-})
As Usual,
EA
🤦
THAT is fucking hilarious! Well put.
Don't laugh! As we type my local Chumash casino is stealing our ideas. “White Fragility” the musical. “White Fragility: An Evening of Pop Song Hits by Old White Men Who Hopelessly Tried to Sound Non-White.”
Start with “Jive Talkin”…
Hahahaha!
I have a bunch of teenage daughters who are all flirting with the social-media fueled addiction to the Daily Outrage On Behalf of the Marginalized drug. Their father and I do the best we can to gently discuss A. the profit motive in promoting outrage addiction and perspective distortion, B. the role in choosing one's attitude and what one chooses to dwell on in mental health, and C. intentionally choosing to run information through an intellectual and logical filter and not an emotional one. It's very difficult because any pushback these kids get, they just kafkatrap; their little smartphone friends triumphantly point out that their parents' differing perspectives is just SOLID PROOF of how OPPRESSION IS REAL and they are LITERALLY IN THE FIGHT OF THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR VERY SAFETY.
Other than keeping their younger siblings the hell off the internet until they have learned to think, I'm not sure what else to do, and I am worried that they will wind up like your daughter one of these days. And I am worried what that means for our family because I will not support or harbor an adult who chooses a brain-virus approach to life over reality and happiness.
"keeping their younger siblings the hell off the internet until they have learned to think"
There's a clue here. Doing my Clint in GRAN TORINO bit: one of the worrisome trends I have observed in under-30s on the internet is the lack of distinction between their internet persona and their real-life persona. When the commercial internet got going in the '90s, it was largely understood that everyone was goofing around and had a fake name, akin to "handles" on the CB radio of the '70s.
It isn't a large shift to apply this observation to active shooter games and mass shootings.
I take your point, I believe, but if anything I think first-person-shooter video games allow young men to blow off steam in a way that has no real-world consequences. I'm not of the Tipper Gore school that thinks TV, video games, or music "causes" violence.
I kind of agree with you on FPS. But in a game like GTA where you can set a hooker on fire instead of paying her, I dunno. That's blowing off steam? It seems like there should be some sort of line drawn, but where?
...I guess setting a virtual hooker on virtual fire in a video game is objectively less harmful than setting a real hooker on real fire in the real world? I dunno.
If there weren't a market for these types of video games, I don't think they would be doing a booming business.
You could also drive into Chinatown and start a firefight with the Tongs at will, or escape from police helicopters and tanks by driving through a car wash/paint shop in GTA. We don’t see those behaviors manifested with any sort of regularity (although I do notice a disturbing tendency amongst younger football fans to not understand that the game on TV is not like the one on Madden)
Wait ... You are NOT Tipper Gore? Blows my whole theory. Are you Lee Ludwig Hart, per chance?
I'm Sonny Bono wearing a Jon Bon Jovi wig. Sorry to disappoint.
Shifting the focus to Tipper Gore and "causation" does not take the point. It's saying and implying things that I was not; it's Presidential Grade interview strategy.
It wasn't my intent to deliberately misinterpret your reply. I guess I mistakenly thought I took the point when I missed it.
Kurt - My sons played shooter games in high school. It drove me crazy. They got to college and the first time a girl made fund of guys in their dorm room paying video games they both dropped them like a hot potato. She did what i could not
The best thing to do for kids is to stay above it, not judge and keep your eyes on what they are doing. You dont have to control them because you can't but if you treat them with dignity they will let you know that the hell they are doing.
You mean you don’t live in Irkutsk?!?!?!
Clearly you missed the episode where I moved to Yakutsk.
Re: grisha koshmarov
Was that before or after your stay on Easter Island? Of course, this could well be one of those dastardly "unintentional misinterpretations".
By the way, I think your mentioning of being in opposition to Tipper Gore's uninformed nonsense was and is relevant, and was responsive to what was being said herein at the time.
It occurred to me earlier that you might be interested, as well as many other Matt Taibbi subscribers here as well of course, in a very recently
published piece of very good news from the folks at The Grayzone.
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/06/29/lawsuit-sulome-anderson-hezbollah/
Spreading this excellent story far and wide, along with more than my share of Red Stripe, has been the best part of my Independence Day thus far.
As Usual,
EA
'Twasn't I who moved to Easter Island; 'twas President John Quincy Adams.
original image: https://bit.ly/3Ar6zlC
from source: https://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2009/12/tutis-balls.html
via: https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/gibbons-library-was-wantonly-dispersed
also relevant: https://kathleenmccook.substack.com/p/porn-rock-satanism-and-tipper-gore
Cheers to you and The Green Mountain Boys on, as one of my comrades likes to put it, Anti-Tyrannical Government Day.
Excising the cancer of social media would probably help, but it would also probably convince them that you're evil incarnate. I fear for what the world will look like when all of these developing minds that have been poisoned by behavior manipulation while stewing in toxic, negative sensationalism-for-profit are old enough to run the show. There really isn't much we can do about it, it seems. But as Wilfred Owen once said, "All a poet can do today is warn." Good luck to you and yours.
It's definitely easier said than done. If I could do it over again, I would have waited much longer to allow smartphones, and I would be stricter about their use. I would not allow social media. But it's constant trying to skate to where the puck is unless you deliberately construct, and zealously patrol, a mini society of like-minded families. No matter what you do your kids have to be plugged in and even if you ban Instagram or TikTok (easier said than done; kids are very clever about hiding their use of things they're not supposed to be doing) their friends just send whatever they want over approved channels. Hard to construct moats when the soccer team uses a Discord server to organize and all the kids in their drama group stay in touch via Snapchat and kids can even find ways to cyberbully each other in the Google Classroom they all were shoved into with covid. Try to keep them from staring at their phones or laptops all day, because if the device is in your hand you're going to give into the temptation to scroll for lazy entertainment and brain candy, and wow look, the school district has switched to digital textbooks. It's a digital occupation of our children's brains and short of saying "sorry, you're going to be the weird offline kid, get used to it" which is what we are doing with our youngest two, there is no real way to fight it at this point. Trying to wake up other parents to this but it's a slow process and they're all addicted to their phones too. (And I'm not blameless in this either. I should be doing work in the physical world right now but I've spent a lot of the day reading and responding to comments in my own version of digital outrage. *sheepish shrug*
What if your nose is constantly buried in a Substack or e-book on your iPhone(note-personally guilty as charged)?
I'd say you're certainly not blameless since every other sentence you write is, "Easier said than done."
Thanks; that’s helpful. 👍
I think finding some decent peers for your kids is huge. And if there aren't any, maybe consider moving. This is yet another reason I'm so glad I left California.
I mean really. You really ought not to shame parents like this with your comments. Interesting to note, however, that you do seem to have what must be a difficult infatuation with mommys and daddys, considering what a peach your's sowed and cultivated. Must've raised you in their spare time.
Shame is a powerful incentive and one that needs to be brought back into western society writ large. This parent seems to understand what is at stake and hopefully is taking the appropriate actions to save the minds of her children.
"Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal, exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war, and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after his death."
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Cool he made lieutenant.
Which for me always begs the question: how exactly does one determine where one's country begins and ends.
I would think legally defined national boundaries might be a reasonable starting point, but once you get into the empire business shit starts getting weird.
Indeed, Grisha.
Another factor if import: Who one is fighting at the moment.
Keep going back to The Sirens Of Titan...can't help but wonder if Branson and/or Bezos aren't secretly hoping to become Winston Niles Rumford. Not holding out hope for a "Church of God the Utterly Indifferent" any time soon, but...
Google maps?
By force of arms. One day, if we're visited by extra terrestrials, and they're as violent as the US has been (our military in action in 90% of some or all of the years since our creation), with their superior technology, this land will be theirs.
At that point, we will fully understand the term, "asymmetrical warfare."
The nautical mile limit, as accepted by international law-ie-where the rum runners and gambling ships busted out their wares back in the day.
https://bit.ly/3fUBy1z April 8, 2021, CityWatch, Hate Money Stalks America, by Richard Lee Abrams
The Wokers tend to hate capitalism even though they do not know i is any more than they know what socialism is. However, both the GOP traditional bigotry and the Dem Woker bigotry are profit driven. They epitomize the Cigarette Approach to Marketing -- that is, sell people something that will kill them by convincing that it makes them look cool
What good does it do to compare the GOP values of 40 years ago to the values of the Democrat Party today? Only one of them is currently destroying the country.
the workers know that they're being ground into nothing by capitalism and socialism isn't being so destructive to them. totally agree on the profit driven game of politics tricking people into thinking any part of the ruling class cares about them
How do we have capitalism and socialism at the same time? How does that work?
If they provide you with new pronouns, you have lost. The chance of that happening with daughters is much higher than it is with boys. From what I can tell, dysphoria is just another way for young girls to say that they don't like their developing breasts.
When your daughter tells you to refer to her and they/them, it is a serious mindfuck. I could deal with rebellion, staying out too late or drugs but I am inherently incapable of understanding this. If you use the wrong pronoun, it is literally the worst thing ever... To ever happen to anyone. Ever.
Manipulating language is just one of many communist tactics. You could win that battle yet still lose the war on many other fronts.
Why not just take their cell phones away from them?
Airily - As the father of 3 who also consume social media I would suggest something. Are you doing the same thing they are on social media and simply landing in a different spot? If you are then i would say you should stop blaming your kids.
People that learn about the world through social media are misinformed. PERIOD. Does not matter what side of the issues you are on you are misinformed. Chomsky's Propaganda Fraemework was created for TV and it has proven even more true with social media.
IF you pull your own head out of your own social media bubble you can start engaging with your kids like the ADULT. Instead of caring what their views are you can just talk to them and ask questions about their views and even find common ground. The more you dig into why someone who's views are formed by social media has come to their conclusions the less convinced they will be they are right. But you cant do that if you two have formed views that may be different but are equally misinformed.
No?
No. You can’t compromise with communism which is all what you call “woke” is. The last thing a responsible parent should do is placate the immature and uneducated thoughts of an indoctrinated child.
You're not wrong, at all, but I'm not sure why you would assume I need to be told to get off social media. The closest I come is reading various Substacks.
I imagine it would take a massive deprogramming effort along the lines of deprogramming cult victims like we had a lot of in the 70’s. Extremely difficult process from what I have read about it. I have no clue how that could be scaled up especially when the authorities required to do so are the ones doing the brainwashing.
Another huge problem is the fact the people not allowing themselves to be brainwashed or too old to know better are slowly becoming demoralized according to the Commies’ plans. So we are all getting hit from both sides. I fear the only thing that will work is a right wing strong man taking power and forcing it which defeats the whole purpose. At least that is what history shows it takes.
Pierce- You are familiar with the term Psychological Projection right?
If not your should be.
Your opinions show an utter lack of critical thinking on your part (eg: is Trump lying about winning the election. or Did Trumps tax cuts pay for themselves)
You can’t even respond to easy questions like these with out showing your lack of critical thinking skills.
So you gave me my belly laugh today reading you voice your concern about “today’s” kids lacking critical thinking skills.
That’s rich coming from you, right?
Thank you! I have been looking for a psychological analysis like this.
The biggest favour you could do for her is to set her free. That will reorder her priorities. You know, paying for shelter, food, transportation etc. Allowing this simply enables it.
I'd agree. Facing adult responsibilities and hardships has a wonderful tendency to bring perspective and clarity.
It can also bring decent manners. That young scholar sounds like a tyrant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSGl3d4KOMk
(completely unrelated on the social justice frontier... one of the first examples of the singular "them")
The wild thing about this video is that it's green-screened in front of a drum set and amps in somebody's library. MTV had money to burn in the '80s. Where is rtj when we need her?
Another from this subgenre: https://youtu.be/ejorQVy3m8E
You rang? Oh, i have to dig up some social justice videos? Ok then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXAlfh6QKQs
ouch
better? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h2jZtuRuic
;)
They bands were producing those videos. Only a few were realy good.
The production values on this puppy are SKY HIGH.
It's exactly how I look on my Teams/Zoom meetings when the fake background is enabled. Nice to see how far technology has come.
"Hey hey Jason! On the beach today huh?! Must be nice!"
-every crappy boss I've had
Jason - Setting her free because you are angry that she does not believe a set of lies you happen to believe is not assured of enabling her to "reorder her priorities". What is is assured of doing is creating a deeper rift between father and daughter.
Maybe she should be on her own and maybe she should not. Economic conditions have forced increasing numbers of 20 something educated children home with their parents. That is neither of their faults. But He does not give the evidence to answer that one way or the other. All he gives us evidence of is that BOTH and and his daughter are delusional because of the media they consume.
I don't think anyone can give him good advice based on his version of things. How about you?
Absolutely!!
Maybe we should all stop sending these indoctrination machines that pose as Colleges and Universities $50K per year to ruin our kids.
Easier said than done. It's a huge issue.
I've got a young teen and tween who are both smart and academically oriented. Not everybody can go to Hillsdale, and they don't offer engineering. I would certainly be as proud of them if they wanted to go into the trades instead of going to university, but I don't think that's going to be a fit for either of them.
I'm hoping we'll see some entrepreneurship and creative destruction in the university sector. There are many parents who want better alternatives.
Trade school is the best route to competence and entrepreneurship at the moment.
Move to Finland...best education in the world and it's free.
No it’s not, LOL. You simply pay for it in significantly higher taxes. Nothing in life is free. At least nothing worth buying.
But everyone will pay the taxes and all will have education and medical. I'm reminded once again of something a man in Denmark (every year named the happiest country) said when someone asked him if he didn't mind paying those high taxes. He said, "No, I don't mind. I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country." How unlike a majority of US Americans. It states in the Preamble to the Constitution that the government's first duty is to the welfare of the people.
Like I said and you confirmed. It isn’t free.
Yes. I have been hoping this as well.
$200k or more to get a credential, to get a shot at a top flight career. What a racket.
I've been holding out hope the system would break down before my kids graduate high school, but I'm running out of time.
Deep truth! Let them Woke on their own dime...
Most WOKE people are living on their own dime. Most Anti Woke people are living on their own dime.
What you are saying is that if your child does not agree with the set of LIES you beleive in then you should not support then right in the middle of a pandemic when more 20 somethings than ever are being forced to live at home.
Got it.
I figured out late, maybe less than 10 years ago, that no one hates progress more than progressives.
Pre-enlightenment feudalists
Well, the whole book Matt is reviewing is pretty explicitly that.
I'm in my mid to late 50's and have children ranging in age from 30 to 18. Only 2 at home at this stage. I commend you patience. I have been known to suggest to my own children that if living with their parents is a hardship, they should move out quickly to lessen their own pain!!
It was 1972. I was 21 and just out of the Army. My father discovered my pipe and my weed and reminded me that it was his home and I was no longer a welcome guest. It was the best thing that ever happened to both of us.
I've noticed the same thing about people addicted to watching the news. I don't know if it's an adrenaline rush or something else, but there seems to be a psychological response to outrage that some people find intoxicating.
I'm curious, what degree is she studying for down in that basement?
"The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt offers an excellent explanation of moral outrage.
And "Hate Inc." by Matt Taibbi details the media's exploitation thereof. ;D
That book is a VERY mixed bag, though it is basically universally praised. If you're interested in a more evolved analysis (I talk directly about Haidt) you can read this: https://empathy.guru/2019/02/21/creating-a-we-for-an-evolving-world-empathetic-leadership-book-refactor-and-the-first-of-two-introductory-posts/
When people hear something which triggers their emotions, they what more of it.
Anger and fear make people more malleable, and therefore more easily controlled. It's most effective when both are induced, but in a pinch, either one will do.
I assume you paid for her entire 4-year ride at the East Coast private university where she failed to attain her Ph.D.? Wow, you're in hell.
Phil - So using your way of thinking you pay for your child's education they are then required to hold your same view of the world regarless of how moronic your view may be. Got it!
Another reason College should be funded by the government,
"So using your way of thinking you pay for your child's education they are then required to hold your same view of the world regarless (sic) of how moronic your view may be."
You could not be more wrong even if you tired twice as hard to fail as you already are.
Phil - Last time i checked paying for your kids COLLEGE does not make your political ideas CORRECT.... No more than getting your PHD makes your political ideas correct.
They BOTH sound like fools who have let corporate media misinform them both so much they are not divided. And that is the goal of corporate media. TO divide. Matt's book HATE INC.... is all about this.
This guy is a victim himself as is his daughter. Maybe he should clean up his own act and start being an ADULT before blasting his kid.
My "politics" are irrelevant.
She's an arrogant, hyper-privileged, over-educated, ungrateful, spoiled, petulant, willfully-unemployed twit. And since her father facilitated her, including allowing her to move back home, guess what that makes him.
Parents are generally willing to go the extra mile for their children. I'm not going to get started on the shit I got bailed out of.
Phil - Corporate media has manipulated Americans into thinking their President was a foreign asset controlled by Putin and on the other side thinking a Presidential election was rigged.
Dividing this father and daughter on LIES and manipulation is just a manifestation of consuming media that is intentionally doin this to us.
Know your enemy. That guys daughter is not the enemy. She is the victim. But the real enemy, corporate media, has fools like you blaming the victim...
God they are good at what they do and you are the proof.
LMAO!!! do you use a pole vault to jump to these cockamamie conclusions?
FNR - It is called being an adult not a child parent. Being just as MISINFORMED as his daughter and then angry at her is childish parenting.
It is called being an ADULT... He needs to let it go and soon she will to. If he is going put and lash out because she has not fallen for the bullshit right wing lies he has all he is doing is showing he is still a child in my view. Grow the F up and get over it.
lovely, now what does that have to do with ridiculous, childlike leaps of logic?
"So using your way of thinking you pay for your child's education they are then required to hold your same view of the world"
LMAO!!! you are so unintentionally funny, you have no idea, right?
Right?
Sadly, she is connected to the Social Umbilicus and being fed pure poison by algorithms which detect, predict and even direct her emotions for max-level advertising. It's evil, I tell you... but what can anyone do?
You can't MAKE an addict quit -they have to want to do it first and foremost.
We have an entire world full of people staring at screens and being manipulated 24/7.
What's the worst that could happen?
Scott - "we have an entire world full of people staring at screens and being manipulated..."
Sadly you are one of them, not?
Re: Hefty Matty
Your fatherly anecdote "Woke Worship" is quite probably the most definitive, and insightful, description of this current "Woke" phenomenon that has infected the reasoning of so many in our society of most all ages. The form of intellectual impatience this behavior reflects has been evident for most of my life {79 years and counting}, most often by those who simply do not think before they speak or, in modern parlance, "tweet"/write. A common behavioral manifestation of this absence of forethought is, of course, too often being adamantly incorrect; while 'believing' their feigned "outrage" to be enlightened and reasonable.
Many years ago there was a wise saying that, I believe(?) described this modern behavior:
"MINDS IN NEUTRAL, FULL SPEED AHEAD!"
Here is another one, if you can't get them to stop it.
"If you don't leave me alone, I'll have to find someone who will!"
As Usual,
EA
Ethan - "woke worship" is a line literally being fed to sheep that consume right wing propaganda... Matt is cashing in on people that consume propaganda and clearly you are one fo them.
He and his daughter are two sides of the same coin. Both equally misinformed. The fact that he is annoyed that his daughter does not share his idiotic ideas is more evidence parents should NOT be funding their kids education if in so doing they think their kids need to beleive their parents idiocy... Right?
"Matt is cashing in on people that consume propaganda"
Nah.
Matt is "cashing in" on people who are sick of propaganda.
Good for him.
Kosh - Woke is literally a made up corporate narrative to distract and divide voters so they don't come together and elect leaders that will change economic policy to help ordinary Americans if it will hurt corporate profits. They don't care what side of the debate Americans are on, only that Americans HATE elected leaders that are not on their side on this issue.
Matt flaming the fires of this because it ropes in people like you who know their economic policy ideas are moronic so you invest your passion in identity political ideas. Matt ropes you in and rings the cash register while holding on to his liberal creds... Right?
"Woke is literally a made up corporate narrative to distract and divide voters so they don't come together and elect leaders that will change economic policy to help ordinary Americans if it will hurt corporate profits."
how can you be able to understand this and at the same time NOT understand that it is also a danger, in and of itself?
if you were trying to escape a deadly maze and knew ahead of time that one corridor crowded with razor-sharp wire was intended to distract, is the razor-sharp wire not dangerous?
it's not hard to understand, unless you refuse to because what you are really trying to convey is something else. that kind of bullshit is easy to spot. seems like you are here to whine at people who do not agree with you and your newly acquired lefty kook mental disease.
FNR - I am not going to wrap my mind around WOKE any more than I am going to wrap my mind around how Trump is controlled by the Putin...
These are all just fantasy's manufactured like a reality TV show to distract you from how you are being screwed financially by the same politicians that side with you on WOKE this and WOKE that.
Stope being manipulated. Matt sucks people like you in with stories like this. Stop validating his strategy and start demanding that he focus on what he is REALLY REALLY good at which is exposing how corporate media is MANIPULATING you to help their corporate overlords.
Piketty doo doo - You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about! This may not be the ideal venue to test your language skills, at least until you actually learn the language du jour.
Heh Jeb...JEB...dammit Jeb awaken, I think thars a snake in yer britches.
As Usual,
EA
Ethan - Got it your writing skills are better than mine. But your parenting skills are not...
Is the use of familial slurs one of the debate tricks you learned at Trump U?
Don't blame your childhood on me, I had nothing to do with it.
And, I'm not really interested in having any more to do with whatever it is that you've morphed into.
Ethan- You are evidence that Matt's strategy is working. it brought in someone like you who is not used to having his ideas challenged much less with logic and facts that reveal weakness in your thinking.
Welcome to the big leagues. You going take your ball and run home to mommy crying or are you going to defend your views with stronger logic, more relevant evidence and more wisdom?
Yes, a parent who is misinformed about politics and then gets angry at his daughter because her misinformation is different than his is showing weak parenting. Even if he paid for her college tuition.
I love that last line and plan to use it against the aggressively WOKE, much appreciated.
Thank you, I appreciate both your appreciation and the "like" of my comment. (:-})
As Usual,
EA
Nothing ever changes because there’s never a consequence to her actions. You’re terrible parents.
Thats a nasty thing to say. It's not parents' fault if their kid is going through a difficult time and processing it with some bizarre woke bullshit. Screw you.
"...their kid is going through a difficult time and processing it with some bizarre woke bullshit."
The parents are still to blame, but less and less so as the "kid" gets older. The only reason the "kid" (an adult, by virtually every standard, in her late 20's and apparently "educated" at an East Coast private university and working on a Doctoral Degree) is having a difficult time is because she has no critical thinking skills; e.g. a Bizarre Woke Bullshit Detection Meter.©
LOL. Of course it's your fault. An entire generation loves their self-delusions more than they love their children.
Sevender, while you are in many ways not wrong, I'm interested in what solutions you have. You're all over this thread telling all these parents who woke up one day to realize their children had been replaced by SJW pod people, and there is no way to get the arrow out that doesn't cause further injury, that it's their fault because they're pussies and failures as parents. Ok fine. You're right. It's our fault and we fucked up. We lost our children to the Hitler Youth and it's all our fault because we had no idea that allowing them in 2013 to communicate with their peers in the socially expected fashion meant that years in the future those channels would be used to insert an ineradicable fungus into their brains. Now what? Since you are so certain that this is state of affairs is under the control of parents, what should those of us with young adults do now, and what should people reading this with toddlers who wish to avoid this situation do?
My suggestion is to learn everything you can about what this critical Social Justice ideology really is about. It ain't pretty, it's Orwellian as hell and has nothing whatsoever to do with Social or Justice
It's Anti-Social Injustice and it has to be stopped
I recommend this reference on what's afflicted your kids.
If you're not able to open this link, peruse other areas of the site
Or subscribe to support professor Lindsay's work
"Drawing from various examples in the neo-Marxist and Critical Pedagogy literature, in this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I make the case that Wokeness is applied psychopathology. That is, the point of a Critical Theory is to induce and groom psychopathologies that the activists can then manipulate to achieve their ends. Join me for a rather daring exploration of this idea."
-James Lindsay
https://newdiscourses.locals.com/post/805751/critical-theory-is-applied-psychopathology-onlysubs-with-james-lindsay-ep-51
If it means anything, I am sympathetic to your situation. You have given her every opportunity to succeed. The situation must be maddening. I would like to think that she will understand that later in life. My best to you and yours.
I don’t know if there is anything you can do when children are small to prevent them from turning into this years in the future (other than love and care for them while setting boundaries and giving them an appropriate amount of chores and consequences), but I know people whose children became drug addicts and were living at home as adults. Because the behavior was so extreme, these parents had to eventually tell their children that they were not welcome in the house anymore. The parents loved their children, but had to set boundaries about what behavior they would tolerate. So, the answer to your question is some form of “my house, my rules”. If it bothers them enough, the parents should tell their daughter to stop, and that if she doesn’t, she will have to live elsewhere. Like a drug addict, she may or may not recover, but the parents don’t have to tolerate her behavior in their house while she is active in her “addiction”.
Unplug
Spoken like someone whose dad should have wiped on the sheets.
We got a tough guy on the thread. Curious as to the self-delusions that turn on sevender. Share with us, sevender, your deepest, dark delusions.
I treat adolescence which ends around age 35, as a form of mental illness. LOL
"Terrible parents" is too harsh, but their current strategy isn't helping her. She's really too old--late twenties--to be acting like this. Can't she process her difficult time without tracking down her parents in the house and yelling at them? How is she going to handle the workplace?
Oh my gosh. Our own parents accepted us and what we said. We accept our children. These are not terrible parents. These are parents who realize life is more complicated than their daughter understands. And ALL parents who are kind and good reflect and are aware our children look at life in ways that our different from us and we understand and sort of smile and remember our youth. We all need to empathize and be amused and discuss without hatred or anger.
Lmao. We have two entire generations now of fat, depressed, socially anxious young people whose IQs are lower than their elders' for the first time since WWII. But you're all Perfect Parents!! LOL.
No, life is really pretty simple. Simple courtesy towards your parents and siblings for starters. These parents are doormats. If a sister of mine operated this way, I'd quickly cut her out of my life and my family's life. Zero tolerance for that kind of horseshit.
I gotta say something to support your statement. Princess is acting like a spoiled princess b/c Daddy & Mommy are (and have been) more interested in being her friend that being good parents. This bs from this kid didn't just magically appear; it's the culmination of years of habits and 'keeping the peace' instead of establishing boundaries. I have zero sympathy.
Snowflake is the mirror image of Archie Bunker. Daddy needs to be the mirror image of The Meathead. Oh, and my credentials are that I raised three daughters, okay?
And like other commenters, I'm curious as to her field of grad work. I'll put a plugged nickel on it ain't STEM! Obviously her behaviour reeks of Grievance studies, but that's too obvious. What is it? Hmmm???
Fair enough; but in this particular war, to take refuge behind a STEM major is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Spoken like someone who has never had a 20 year old spawn live in their house.
Why be so nasty and rude, ya cunt?
Scott - I have had 3 20+yr old spawn living in the house. None of them agreed with me on politics. Did not bother me any more than my views bothered them. The older the get the more they end up thinking like me, but that is because they are out in the workforce crushing it. We are lucky few in this country moving forward and not one of us thinks it is because we are more brilliant or work harder than anyone. We just live in the right place at the right time and being swept forward by trends we did nothing to create. Just like the majority of Americans who are being swept down word (despite being smarter and working harder than us) by the trends they did noting to create.
We may not agree on politics but we agree that some places are economically better than others and people living in those places should appreciate their great fortune.
Man, my kid was spazzing out from the internet during Covid too. I went on walks with her to the park with our Dachshund until the gibberish stopped spewing forth from her mouth. It usually ended when she saw a duck or something.
Exercise is the best cure for all the bad feels, bro.
Gaga - I fear you have missed the central them from most of the "parents" on this board. What you have articulated is what any normal parent would do.
These "parents" think that if the dad is paying the bills his daughter is required to tell her dad his moronic ideas (mostly lies and fabrications) are absolutely brilliant and how much she adores the close attention he pays to every syllable uttered by Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson.
That seems to be the consensus on parenting on Matt's board. Right Matt?
What an awful way to live.
For the adults? Absolutely.
For the infant they're enabling? It's a wonderful life. Every day is Christmas, her birthday and Juneteenth combined.
Recommendation: Tell her to believe whatever she wants. Tell her to behave like an adult or get out. Now she has something genuine about which to be enraged.
I don’t know. Being angry all the time is an awful way to live. You are right they need to cut off the financial support immediately. These adults need to live in the real world
Maybe move her out of the basement and into the attic? Make sure there is no WiFi up there. If she wants to stay make her go through every box and organize all the Christmas decorations and photos and Granny’s old chest of clothes and recipes. Let her rock in Granny’s rocker and peruse all the old books and Bibles and letters. When she has finished all that and written a 200 page paper about her experience then take her to the lake for a few weeks of camping with no WiFi.
Then help her move out. That oughta set her head on straight.
No wifi. No A/C. And finish the sheetrock project up there while you’re at it.
He and his daughter are two side of the same coin.... Both are being manipulated to insure the rich and powerful keep their power by dividing us. Father and daughter, conservative and liberal. Just keep voters divided and the rich keep getting richer at the expense of everyone else.
Sad to say, but many of her generation are clueless...and also helpless. Putting her out on her own wouldn't have the desired affect. She would more than likely end up in the arms of some nutcase like DiAngelo.
It is time to stop being an enabler. Set the beast free and see if she can live in the wild.
“I was excited and felt an immediate need to let them know I was not racist,” she explains, adding: “I proceeded to spend the evening telling them how racist my family was. I shared every racist joke, story, and comment I could remember my family ever making…”
When someone tells you they're incapable of self-awareness, believe them.
That quote struck me as well. There must be something wrong me. When I, a white guy, meet black people, I interact with them just as I do with other INDIVIDUALS.
My parents and grandparents were hardly on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement either, in terms of race relations, but being a normal, well-adjusted individual, I’ve managed to mature and raise a young man far superior to me without feeling the need to walk around self-flagellating for clicks and profit.
Ah but if you had been slow roasting your mind in collectivist doctrine and learning to view every micro-action and thought exclusively through the filter of racial dynamics whilst hardly ever meeting an actual living breathing black person....you might find it a lot harder to do that.
Gawd, ain’t it the truth! She sounds insufferable.
:-)
If she truly is non-racist, she would simply go to dinner with people of color and enjoy the evening with them talking about sports, family stuff, business, or anything else. Her selfinvolved need to talk about race shows her disregard for anything about the people except their color. That is the definition of racism. She needs to forget about “other white people” and focus on working on her own sad personality.
She needs to “do the work”! Lol
Yeah, well, according to St Kendi, there’s no such thing as a non-racist, just racist and anti-racist. “Self-involved” is exactly the right word.
“Live and let live” is I guess a ship that sailed long ago.
It seems like the people with her sort of mindset think by spouting off how woke they are they're good people and don't actually need to work to improve their personality, temperament, integrity, etc. I'd bet in her mind she considers herself fully evolved.
All DiAngelo sees is race. She is the one with a major problem.
The excerpted anecdote was an attempt by DiAngelo to admit to her own problematic behavior. By criticizing her in an attempt to join this bandwagon here you accidentally agreed with her.
Criticize = agree. Don't criticize = agree. What are the other options?
Notice race: racist. Say "I don't see race": racist.
Agree with DiAngelo: racist who needs to "do the work". Don't agree with DiAngelo: racist who's too "fragile" to "do the work."
Say you have black friends: racist, reducing friends to colors. Don't say you have black friends: neo-segregationist.
The only way to win is not to play. Smile, nod, and walk away.
😂
Bizarre comment.
Erm..Her behaviour in the anecdote isnt 'problematic' its flat out loony toons absurd. It's like a cartoon skit of the most absurdly try-hard woke person who is so desperate to show a black person how non racist and right-on they are that they somehow end up spending the whole evening actually subjecting them to racist jokes and being incapable of talking to them as human beings.
I mean... what the actual Fuck????
That should litetally be an episode of South Park
But apparently DeAngelo is serious....?
What is a whole class of well-meaning people to do when they have everything and it's still not enough? Well, they join a cult - anything that will explain both their misery and their abundance. There is a reason why cults - from Charles Manson to EST to Nxium target the richest among us. And why people who struggle to put food on the table are less likely to fall for a charlton who promises them enlightenment.
it's a movement of millions of chronological adults with the maturity level of a sheltered, spoiled pre-teen.
"here's 99% of what you want, 99% of best anyone has ever had, anywhere, ever."
to which they respond:
"everything is all bad. I am living in Hell."
Exactly. What do you give people who have everything? Anxiety.
I've heard the punchline as Xanax. Same difference.
I am 71 and all this CRT and wokeness and talk of being cis-gendered or whatever does have a feeling of cultness. Like the Emperor with no clothes and everyone in the crowd admiring how beautiful his clothes were, save one child who had the innocence of brutal truth to blurt out, “The Emperor has no clothes!”
The spell was broken as even the Emperor looked down and could see he was wearing no clothes.
I can understand how in the corporate world people who have spent decades of their lives trying to get to the top would “go along to get along” with this WF bullshit, but I think a cult is a cult and a bad fad is a bad fad.
Eventually (sooner rather than later I hope), the clear thinkers with eyes to see will come to the same conclusion as Rodney King did: “Can’t we all just get along?!”
Right, like when the In Crowd used to say how "beautiful" and "brave" Caitlyn Jenner is/was.
Um... Looks like Bruce Jenner with bad plastic surgery and fake tits. So... like every other Hollywood hag who's "been to the best". Jenner should have just fucking aged naturally and changed sexes. Nope... had to look like Michael Jackson.
Fuck that shit...
I was a non-traditional college student (code for old-guy) that graduated in 2015. Many of the kids I went to class with had never skinned a knee, never bled, some had never experienced pain, and most had had a silver platter life. The anxiety level of these kids was palpable.
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/over-50-percent-white-liberal-women-under-30-mental-health-condition?fbclid=IwAR2rqVy8TiQX3WTVKEvl5UbVSyDPOQYCkKIYIfrExQBt6Au9nX119eed-Os
Great comment, but you may be a little generous with "well meaning." White, privileged DiAngelo fans live in safe, comfortable cocoons, but spout ideas that hurt poor people who pay the consequences. Insane ideas like "defund the police" don't come from poor minorities who have to put their kids in the bathtub when the bullets are spraying across the neighborhood. They come from the Robin DiAngelos and Lisa Benders (from Minneapolis City Council). Is that well meaning?
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Ideals that cut against one's own [apparent] interests are a luxury, and therefore a marker of status.
https://quillette.com/2019/11/16/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure-class-a-status-update/
That and fleecing rich people is attractive, well, because they have the money you want. Can't help thing of Jeffrey Epstein.
It’s that or drugs. I prefer my drug addicted rich friends to the rage addicted work ones. At least the drug addicts can be fun sometimes
The American working class have never had a revolution because they are too busy working-Eric Hoffer
OoOoh... maybe they'll all drink poison and go away then!
Robin DiAngelo is a variant of Mad Cow Disease. I live in a small city with a lot of wealthy white liberals who love this Robin DiAngelo crap. It's just guilty white liberal masturbatory masochism. Back before the lockdown if I went to a dinner party I could be certain that one or more of the people at the table would gas on about how much they hated living in a place with so little diversity. I'd sit there thinking it wasn't like anyone forced them to live here. Much cheaper to live in Baltimore or Detroit or the South Side of Chicago. The head of our sweet little botanic garden got his board to read DiAngelo. Then they sent out an email about how racism would not be tolerated anymore at the garden. I asked them for a specific example of racism and they couldn't come up with any. But nonetheless they insisted white supremacy and white fragility are a serious threat. These people are sick in the head. White supremacy and fragility is not a problem. Mentally ill white liberals are the problem.
In my weaker moments, people like that make me wish the mob comes for the suburbs one day.
Moi aussi.
I am willing to Venmo a donation to the Vengabus for this mob.
No nonononononono... The Vengabus is coming? We're going to Ibiza??? I'll go pick up some E.
I don't think being totally out of touch is a mental illness. But yes, this cohort of totally out of touch people (not all of whom are white, btw) is a huge problem.
Thank you Matt. DiAngelo is an awful, self-loathing, condescending, race-baiting Marxist huckster. A good friend of mine, an educated man of color, asked me to read WF. I agreed. When it arrived, I took it on vacation to read on the beach. (white privilege alert!) After finishing the second chapter, I called him to verify that there wasn't some demented child abuse edition of the book that I may have ordered. He assured me that, that thought, was simply more evidence of my natural and incurable white racist behavior. I asked, "And that doesn't even feel, much less sound, racist to you?" The damage this woman has done on adults should be embarrassing to adults.
How is she in any way "Marxist"? I think you misuse that adjective.
Hi Tedder130, I understand that one of the awful (and deadly) tenants of Marxism is to separate the classes. In DiAngelo's case, she specifically uses race as class. Another Marxist tenant is the elimination of the individual in favor of the "class". That's why I use the term Marxist. If you have a different or interesting perspective, I have an open mind.
You get a lot of Marx apologists in this audience. There are even outright communists in the comments sometimes that will deny the Uygher Muslim camps and that the Russians persecuted the Jews.
I agree with you completely. This is race communism, not unlike the Nazis. But people will make excuses for whatever reason.
There are a lot of smart people who are Marxist, communists, Buddhists, and so on. They point out that the so-called genocide of Uyghur Muslims is a propaganda ploy by the usual actors to manufacture consent for war on China. How is this even controversial?
Russians under the Czar persecuted Jews for many reasons. The USSR attempted to alter that practice, especially since many Party members were Jews. Nevertheless, there is a large Russian Jewish diaspora who will never forgive Russia for its past depredations.
And what in the world is "race communism"? The term itself is contradictory. It seems that due to over 100 years of elite propaganda, anything that is 'bad' is just called 'communist'.
I’m talking about someone who specifically called themselves a communist. Not a theoretical example.
There are actual videos of people being held for trains to these “re-education camps” and eye witness testimony of these horrible re-education camps.
But no one gives a shit about the story from this minority group as long as it defends communism.
Gross... at least be open- minded about shit. Sitting there denying these people a voice when there is a mountain of evidence about the atrocities of human rights by the CCP - a) what they did to the HK protestors, b) what they did to the Tibetan Monks, c) Tianemen Square, d) anti-suicide nets in Shenzhen China.
Are all those stories fake too? Wtf?!
I am not the one to educate you about the CPC; you need to do so yourself. But I can point out that all propaganda contains a kernel of truth. The propagandist elaborates and expands and distorts that truth for the aims of the rulers--whoever they are.
For example, the reality of Xinjiang stems from a terrorist group, the Al Qaeda linked East Turkestan separatists--funded by the CIA/NED/USAID spooks, a real problem that the CPC is trying to solve without murdering the population (as the US has done in the Middle East). Do not take this 'genocide' nonsense for gospel. There are other stories for Tibet, Hong Kong, and so on than is presented in US mainstream media.
and if it isn't defense of communism by silence, it is anti-USA by ignoring the kinds of things "those people" say (meaning, non-leftists).
and the kulaks.
All the smart Marxists like James Burnham and Thomas Sowell came to reject Marxism as fashionable nonsense and murderous as an ideology.
For symmetry, shall we discuss the children being held in cages while waiting for families who are ready to take them? Or how about the hideous statistics as to poverty, violence, maternal health and other indices of well being for our indigenous peoples? Something about "people who live in glass houses...." or "Let he who is without sin...." comes to mind.
Then let’s talk about how communism killed tens of millions of people and how race communism killed tens of millions of Jews in extermination camps. Would you be down with that discussion as well?
Communists did not kill tens of millions of people--you refer to Ukrainians. Stalin holds that agency--and Stalinism is not the same as Communism. You are stretching history and ideology to make such an absurd & offensive comment that "race communism killed tens of millions of Jews in extermination camps." Absurd.
People who live in glass houses cut the hell out’re their feet from all them rocks they been chunkin’
is symmetry necessary? is it not possible to examine the wrong done by X without mentioning the wrong done by Y?
seems this is only necessary when the person asking for symmetry either sympathizes with X or really dislikes Y.
I think of it more as needed context, needed because as Douglas Murray would ask… compared to what?
The Uygher Muslim camps and our immigrant processing holding centers have nothing in common. Nothing. I can’t believe allowing low iq or insincere posters to assert they do will convince anyone that parents sending their unaccompanied children, or dragging along their children to present for asylum consideration in our country is comparable to being imprisoned in a re-education camp.
And slavery/colonialism tends to be presented as a debt YT owes to the entire continent of Africa’s poor which is ahistorical and requires context, while American descendants of slaves have a legitimate claim for redress.
Ironically, their one asset, American citizenship bought by the slave labour and spilled blood over 400 years of their ancestors, is being bartered away to the world’s black and brown under some globalist vision.
So much time is spent trying to place a label, after which the engagement of ideas can end. If she’s just a marxist commie and he’s just a right wing nut job authoritarian - shrugs all around.
It’s a king of the hill displacement technique that totally avoids engagement with pragmatic issues of our country in my opinion by making the whole discussion a power struggle obsessed with skin melanin, profit to be made by the few, status quo for the many.
Not at all. But that is your take on it. You want to proclaim serious offenses of one entity and ignore all others. It won't work.
Heh, the Nazis had LOADS of good excuses, too.
That's nice cunts... I'm glad their bullshit was ended.
Marxism and Nazism are cut from the same murderous egalitarian cloth as the French Reign of Terror.
"You get a lot of Marx apologists in this audience." First, there numbers are less then the haters, so its really not that disproportionate, and Second many of us aren't really apologists in that we think he is right, we just think his ideas are being hugely exaggerated and misrepresented.
"There are even outright communists in the comments sometimes that will deny the Uygher Muslim camps and that the Russians persecuted the Jews." First, the Russian Programs before Communism killed more Jews then the ones following communism, so those terrible pogroms seems to be less the fault of communism and more the fault of pre-21st century Russian governments in general regardless of system. Second, while the suffering of Uygher Muslims is terrible I am not seeing anyone deny it nor do I really see how that is strictly communism's fault -- the big transnational companies that profit most from it like Apple could make it stop any time if they insisted their products not be made with slave labor, and instead they are the ones spending their capitalist resources to help this slavery continue: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/11/apple-continues-use-china-slave-labor-report-shows/
I abhor what is happening to the Uyghers, but just like the suffering of the Russian Jews I see no reason to believe it is strictly communisms fault and wouldn't be happening otherwise. This is especially as it is the most capitalist of the transnational companies propping this situation up and encouraging it meanwhile "communist" China is really mostly just communist in name only -- its really is just a party-aristocracy that regulates over what is otherwise just a free-enterprise society where and when it isn't actively regulating which is more than you seem to intimate. You can can call an A-bomb a banana but that doesn't make it true. China calls itself a communist country because it helps keep the uprisings down by claiming "yes this is a government and system designed for the people" then it is to admit "yah we hijacked and replaced what was intended to be that system with a vastly extra-cruel hybrid of aristocracy and the worst of free-market ideals" <- the optics on admitting that truth just wouldn't be very good or useful to the aristocratic rulers like Xi.
Nice to meet again our demented Frances: "...comments sometimes that will deny the Uygher Muslim camps and that the Russians persecuted the Jews..."
The "genocide" of Uyghur people in China is as fake War party/CIA propaganda as not that long ago a coming "genocide of Jews in USSR" - see below:
Elie Wiesel's Israeli propaganda and the myth of Soviet genocide against the Jews
His book "The Jews of Silence" was created as part of Israel’s covert propaganda and influence program targeting American Jews.
Elie Wiesel's Israeli propaganda and the myth of Soviet genocide against the Jews - Immigrants as a Weapon (substack.com)
https://yasha.substack.com/p/elie-wiesels-israeli-propaganda-and
Yasha Levine -- Apr 28
Frances knows not how to spell "good Uyghurs Moslems", mixes terms Russia and USSR, didn't notice that Russia stopped being Communist 30++ years ago, and has no feeling for the modern Warshaw Gheto -- the horror of open concentration camp, Gaza
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1XaJs3XsAYIC3B?format=jpg&name=small
I have not read Ms DiAngelo and I will not, so I don't know how she is using 'race' instead of 'class'. All I know is that her analysis, as shown by Matt, is in no way Marxist. First, Marx does not 'separate' the classes, he simply analyzes them for what they are. In this day, his thought about class is taken for granted. Second, I don't know what you mean by "elimination of the individual", except how neoliberalism exalts the individual in our modern days. None of this seems to have anything to do with DiAngelo's work.
What Mike means by "separate" the classes is to strictly divide the population into them, assume nobody can move between them and assume that their thoughts, wishes and behaviours can be trivially derived from which class they're in.
Marxism was never widely accepted, even in Marx's day, because it's patently nonsense. Capitalists work, but even if you consider their work to somehow not be labour, many capitalists are themselves former (e.g. factory floor) workers. Capitalists can also go back to being workers if their business goes under, so Marx's assumption that there's a bright line between these largely arbitrary classes is false. And people knew it was false back when he was promoting this idea.
Marxism is fundamentally a collectivist ideology that "eliminates the individual" insomuch as it assigns people beliefs and desires based on their "class" (which is itself assigned to them), and any objections by people who don't in fact think that way are not listened to but ignored or written off as "false consciousness".
Marx says little of what you seem to ascribe. He merely analyzes the reality of 19th century capitalism, adumbrating the rise of financial capitalism, and no one has really refuted his claims, least of all the libertarians you seem to favor. Marx is one of the major thinkers of the liberal project that began in the Enlightenment and his thought has had enormous impact on the world. As far as 'individualism v class', Marx's end state of communism is a classless society, very much like Jesus' kingdom of heavan.
Right. In other words it’s non workable utopian nonsense.
Economist Rick Wolff would disagree with your "take" on Marx and Marxism.
Marx was indeed a major figure, but his "impact on the world is universally awful. And I don't know about libertarians, but his work has been thoroughly refuted by multiple other thinkers. He is definitely worth studying though
"What Mike means by "separate" the classes is to strictly divide the population into them, assume nobody can move between them and assume that their thoughts, wishes and behaviours can be trivially derived from which class they're in." -- this is absolutely hilarious. Typical conservative/libertarian numbskull grasp of Marx. diAngelo & her ilk have absolutely NOTHING whatsoever to do with marxism or socialism. Rightwingers just use those words in mindless kneejerk fashion. To observe & analyze the existence of different economic classes of people in the 19th century is to observe REALITY. Geezus, you people are dum.
I'm sorry but I don't understand your comment. Your first sentence states that you haven't and will not read DiAngelo, and your last sentence (assertion) seems to contradict that. Thanks for the civil exchange.
That's because it's a bot or a provocateur whose sole intent is to takeover and divert the thread.
Sorry, only class is class, and Marx had Tenets, landlords have Tenants. You really haven't read much have you?
I really hate comments like this. They take away from the conversation. You come off as a jerk, too.
Should I have carefully explained that class refers to whether you have to sell your labor, and is not really a synonym for a classification? If we left something rich like 'Marx's Tenants' unmocked, what happens the next time they spout off?
Shhhh. This garbage and Kendi’s garbage and the indoctrination we see-it’s riddled with recycled Marxist garbage irrespective of your protests to the contrary.
Well, God forbid anybody should attempt to discuss Marx with any exactitude, or, for that matter, other religious figments like 'capitalism is given by God/Nature.' The whole discussion might fall apart and then we couldn't rant authoritatively about people in central Aasia we've never seen.
Come off as a jerk?!?! No, I'd say Cruella Snarcalita IS a jerk, and exactly the kind of person that ends up driving me away from forums like this. There are just too many Cruella Snarcalita's.
My typing inadequacies are duly noted. And, yes, I do read often. Why such an obnoxious comment? Is civil discourse that difficult for you? This thread is interesting with your contribution being an exception.
Silly comment.
You really need to acquaint yourself with Marxism before you start reciting what you may have overheard at a party as the definitive analysis. In the first place, Marxism doesn't propose "separating the classes." Classes, by definition, are already separate. Marxism requests that members of the working class (the proletariat) become conscious of their existence within the class to which they already belong, and organize for their own liberation.
And as far as "elimination" goes, eliminating class *distinction* is the ultimate goal of communism, not melting into a state-worshipping mass. (That has much more in common with Nazism.)
Do your homework, son!
That's circular logic: merely playing with words. It has no intellectual merit.
"Classes, by definition, are already separate". The critique of Marx is not that classes don't exist at all - that's a strawman argument you just invented - but that his assumption that there are bright dividing lines between them and that people are born into those classes. That belief is wrong. Because it's wrong, Marxism has to try and explain people's rejection of these wrong beliefs without admitting to their wrongness, hence the concept that the working classes are somehow "not conscious" of the fact that they're working class. Such drivel.
Also! There seems to be a common idea in some of these comments that Marx was correctly analyzing life in Victorian England. He was not, and had to rely constantly on fraudulent in practices in his written works to disguise that fact.
One of his favorite tricks was to rail against situations described in factory inspectorate reports, many of which were written decades before he cited them, whilst ignoring that those mill owners had already been prosecuted, or that factory safety laws had already been reformed by Parliament many years earlier. He had to ignore these facts, because his whole thesis was that capitalism could not reform itself and was going to self-destruct. He also liked to point almost exclusively at archaic nearly feudal "industries" as examples of what all of capitalism was like, whilst ignoring much better capitalised firms that had better conditions. This often proved the opposite of his case, because e.g. his criticism of small family baking firms boiled down to: conditions are bad because they lack sufficient capital to invest in machinery. In more advanced industries he struggled even harder to make his arguments work, like railways, where he was trying to argue that they were very dangerous and capitalist railways were killing more and more people, whereas in reality railways were rapidly becoming the safest mode of transport that existed.
In one notorious case, some other researchers who checked a quote attributed to a British prime minister by Marx discovered it was wholly fabricated and the PM had in fact said the opposite.
All of Marx is like this. His work isn't an intellectual nor cutting analysis of anything, it's just lots of academic jargon and deceptive claims, many of which fall apart when his citations are checked. The man contributed nothing of any intellectual merit to the world, and it betrays a deep malaise in society that so many people think he did.
""Classes, by definition, are already separate". The critique of Marx is not that classes don't exist at all ... but that his assumption that there are bright dividing lines between them and that people are born into those classes. That belief is wrong. "
A "class" you are born into is called a "caste". I am unaware of any writing by Marx that suggests that the capitalist, bourgeois, petit bourgeois or proletariat classes are permanent states of being for their constituent members.
"Because it's wrong, Marxism has to try and explain people's rejection of these wrong beliefs without admitting to their wrongness, hence the concept that the working classes are somehow "not conscious" of the fact that they're working class. Such drivel."
Merely claiming it is "drivel" does not make it so. In order for a class to be "conscious", it must be aware of its own circumstances, and its members must see the similarities they shares with other members of the same class who are otherwise kept distracted by things like racism.
So, for example, if people were raised since birth to believe that, upon entering the work force, they had a common interest with other people who share the same position in an industry (say, as assembly line workers), and have needs very distinct from their managers or the industry's owners, then you could say they were "conscious" of their place in the order of things, their "class". Instead, we are trained since birth to believe that we should have no solidarity with our fellow workers, and should instead embrace the capitalist perspective on work and reward. That is what it means for a class to be unconscious of itself.
The rest of what you said is just an attempt to "gotcha" Marx.
Um, you'd be wanting 'tenet' here, Mike. (I know, I know.... But SOMEBODY'S got to do it.) You're welcome.
Suggest you read "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson and re-consider your perspective. Or not.
Too much here to fully elaborate, but some:
Pertinently, 'caste' is not the same as 'class'; the former is fixed, the latter is fluid. Caste seems much more to describe segregation while we know that there are many black capitalists. My 'perspective' is that it is just nonsense to portray any thought you don't like as 'Marxist'.
Good suggestion, I read "Caste", it's an honest look at the economic divide which is where our real problems lie, nothing like money or lack thereof to separate the people.
Suggest you extricate yourself from this lunatic cult.
Which one. There are so many.
That book is pretty silly. Nothing much interesting in it a thinking person wouldn't know, and where it does go off the beaten path it is wrong.
Hmm, good point but maybe it's more accurately "Marxite".
Still, she does equate race with class... and thinks all YPIPO are rich or privileged. Guess she's never been to Appalachia.
So, the KKK is Marxist, too?
lol
"Marxist" is just a synonym for "bad" or "makes me uncomfortable" for a lot of conservatives. DiAngelo's stuff is bad for enough reasons that nobody should need to invent new ones.
"Racist" is just a synonym for "bad" or "makes me uncomfortable" for a lot of lefties. DiAngelo's stuff is bad for enough reasons that nobody should need to invent new ones.
Lenin summarized the Marxist view of the world by saying that all of human history can be reduced to one question: "Who whom?" (Kto kogo.) Who is doing it to whom?
In other words, everything and everyone must be viewed through the lens of oppression.
In that sense, she is certainly Marxist, although a particularly low and vulgar kind.
This comment is why I like the comment sections of Matt's articles. I had never heard of this before and was able to verify it and learn something. Thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%2C_whom%3F
Check your Russian. Your phonetics are off.
I'm fluent and studied in Moscow. What's your objection, that it's pronounced kto kovo, but spelled kto kogo? How is that possibly worth noting here?
Kto kogo and Kto Kovo would both be fine for English speakers.
:-D Mbi trachaem mozgi drug drugu!
It’s obvious she’s substituted class with race. If you don’t see the Marxism running thru this garbage I don’t know how to help. And yes, I’ve read.
If she has substituted 'class' with 'race' then she fails to understand either. There is nothing redeemable about her work, except perhaps in the minds of certain commenters to indulge in their obvious hatred of Marx.
it's always personal. it can't be his ideas are garbage, it's just that people hate HIM!
so silly.
The key architecture of Marxism is to divide the community up into distinct categories where membership is immutable, the groups are in perpetual conflict, and one of the groups is oppressing the others. The end game always results in the elimination of the 'oppressor,' group. CRT and DiAngelo adopt the Marxian architecture and simply swap race for economic position. While I don't know if DiAngelo is a Marxist, she is an absolute adherent of their basic ideological architecture.
All of "wokeness" is a derivative of Marxism by way of the Frankfurt School and other similar thinkers like Gramsci and Derrida and the various anti- and post-colonialist thinkers whose ideas depend on Lenin's (probably wrong) imperialism theory. That's how.
cultural marxism groups people, which can be neutral, but it is also strongly anti-individual. she is enthusiastically anti-individual.
IMO, it is one of the worst things about the left.
they consolidate in order to dominate.
She makes too much to be a Marxist.
"In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists." Whittaker Chamber
Except this is no longer true. The working class aren’t Democrats any longer, and communism for all the discussion here about it, is a dead philosophy.
Many of the 19th century communists came from bourgeois backgrounds. They were called 'class traitors'.
today I like to call them "financially comfortable, guilt-ridden, gullible white people (who want absolution on the cheap)"
Funny but not accurate. I know Marxists who are quite well off.
it's easy to call yourself a communist when you're rich.
Groucho, not Karl?
So did Engels.
Ironic and very funny! :)
She is in no way a Marxist. Since she is anti universalism, she is most likely a postmodernism and a neoliberal.
I'm an educated man of color when I get a tan. If I were a "man of color" due to heredity I think I'd believe white people have gone completely insane. And I'd be right!
But I'd awkwardly smile and try not to say anything about it in public.
Seriously, to be a fly on a wall at an African-American barber shop these days . . . can you imagine?? What you would hear?? It would be hilarious and devastating at the same time.
White people were partly insane to begin with, but so are most people everywhere they form into groups.
I recommend that anyone who reads this post (from Mike) not continue down the rabbit hole he’s started.
So, is thoughtful dialogue and exchange now considered a rabbit hole? Let's at least call it the briar patch. :)
Sounds like you need better friends.
A white woman who is by her own admission uncomfortable interacting with people from other races assumes all other white people share this trait (we don't), then constructs elaborates rules that she demands we all use in interactions with people who aren't white. Then she makes a ton of money at it.
A story: my partner is Latino and I am white. A few years ago, we went through a period where we were having focused weekly conversations about various issues in our relationship. One week, the issue we chose was "one of us is brown and one of us is white."
Afterwards, I told a progressive white friend about this, and her first reaction was: "Oh, that must have been so uncomfortable!" No, I told her, it was a Tuesday at our house. That was an easy conversation; sex, money and housework are the tough ones.
Fast forward a couple of years, and she's terminating my contract with an agency she works for because I'm not aligned enough with their woke agenda.
The problem isn't that progressives have taken over the conversation about race. The problem is that people who are uncomfortable talking about race have taken over the conversation about race.
One of the things that brings me here is that so many of the commenters sound like people I'd like to drink beer with. And a few of them sound like the people we'd complain about/ make fun of as we tippled.
In all honest, I'd tweet about her to her boss and others complaining she's firing you after you discussed dating a Latino and call her a racist.
hahah someone should do this.
"She fired me after she found out I'm gay and in an interracial relationship. She made a face when she found out and then she treated me badly for two years before getting my canned from a project."
For real.
Sorry the cunt fired you. What an ignorant shit.
"No, I told her, it was a Tuesday at our house."
The great Raúl Juliá on this topic: https://youtu.be/oDRnVPlRzag
You should get paid simply for the pain of reading through that. You read it so that we don't have to. You have my deepest gratitude.
I admit I have never read White Fragility. (Life is too short.) But this woman sounds like a horrible human being who, rather than simply admit she is a horrible human being, generalizes her horribleness to all those who look like her and now makes money on it. And she gets away with it because white liberals separate the chosen from the damned by level of guilt.
I'm honestly not sure about that. I think she may very well believe all of it in a 1984 double-thhink kind of way.
Another great article, Matt. Keep up the great work! Between you, Glenn and Bari I don't understand how more people aren't frightened by the direction the far left is taking the Democratic Party and how pseudo academic work is being socialized and taught like its peer reviewed scientific theory
Don't forget John McWhorter. https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/
He is awesome
Yes he has the street cred.
I'll have to check him out. Thank you for the recommendation
Those are my favorite three authors as well. Each piece is a treat!
They're all excellent. I find myself going back and reading their pieces several times
Now add Snowden. continuing ED.
They aren't far left. They come from establishment, affluent backgrounds who are certain all their thoughts, however inane, represent truth.
Dumb question on my part, who is Bari?
Bari Weiss. She's excellent, check her out.
She's a neocon hack. Hardly what I would call excellent.
Bari Weiss? Lol, have you gotten into the Tide pods again?
The smell of freshly laid astroturf made my vision all blurry. Those were tide pods?
Common side effect--delusional rantings with no basis in fact, etc. Stay away.
Thanks I will!!!!!
https://bariweiss.substack.com/about
Read her nytimes exit article. Made me a fan.
I did as well, and that's when I subscribed!
Every time I read the name Bari Weiss, I instantly think of this song. Sorry. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZui5pteOoM
Every time I read the name Bari Weiss, I think of the words "toady" and "Assad."
Everyone who knows nothing about Bari should watch this before they decide to take this sockpuppet seriously. I don't particularly like or agree with Jimmy, but his comments on this interview are great:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS-sxJFn6O0
Not as entertaining as Fun Lovin' Criminals. :)
Last summer, the CEO of my large corporate company sent out a newsletter praising White Fragility and suggesting we all read it. Tells you something.
I'm sure the burgeoning upper class Nazis went around handing out Mein Kampf, or its lesser-known sequel Mein Krampf: the story of Hitler's short but exuberant career in track and field.
underrated
I somewhat reluctantly agree.
I’m waiting for the movie.
I have to wonder whether your CEO read it first, or if the suggestion was just made to virtue signal.
I’m not surprised. This sounds like the stuff my former workplace would require.
Exactly. This is their playbook-recognize it next time you hear a CEO rambling on about “equity” which no one can define..and is gibberish
Pro tip" until the CEOs second homes are gifted to homeless people, they don't mean it.
Well of course none of them actually mean it in the sense of giving any of their money or advantages to those without (of any color), but some see through the bullshit but realize they have to parrot it anyway, and some actually believe the bullshit. That's the distinction I am making.
Until Gates and Buffett advocate for 50% taxes on accumulated wealth, capital gains and estates, they are full of shit.
Large institutional investors--Vanguard, Fidelity, Blackrock--are pressuring corporations to hire Diversity & Inclusion officers. Woke ideology is a control mechanism, and it's not going away.
What is the reason that an investor would want companies they invest in to do this? I can think of lawsuit avoidance, or possibly boycott avoidance, but honestly, both of those seem like smaller risks than the amount of resources that DEI implies in additional staff and then just lost time for all of the existing staff when they're invited to mandatory meetings for DEI training. Am I missing the real reason?
My guess is it's not about mitigating risk or generating value; it's about political control. Last summer, we saw a whole lot of corporations line up very quickly in lockstep with the BLM movement. It was quite unprecedented--and a bit creepy, wasn't it? It was *not* just a marketing exercise either as many people argued. It's one thing to put a BLM logo on your advertisements, quite another to instruct employees to "be less white" in internal HR videos.
Here's what they have to say about it:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/blackrock-plans-to-push-companies-on-racial-diversity-in-2021
Basically, it is no longer okay for corporations to focus solely on maximizing profits. They must follow the edicts of their masters in Davos, and this is the mechanism for making that happen.
Agree, but there are many true believers in the ranks also. A fun if depressing game is reading the LinkedIn posts of my husband's colleagues and guessing which are obligatory yet fake prostrations toward the altar, and which are genuine expressions of religious fervor. The women in particular seem to really mean it, even hard charging CEOs whom you would expect to be a little more removed from full-bore participation in moral panics.
Does anyone here read German?
After World War II, scholars interviewed average Germans to see why they were attracted to Nazism in the first place. For some reason the men’s interviews have been translated into English and are available online but the women’s never were. I wonder why.
After the war the Allies interviewed average Germans to see what had attracted them to Nazism. Interestingly the Allies published translations of the men’s interviews but not the women’s. I’d be very curious.
This is, and will be, the best comment.
There are lots of overpaid CEOs out there but if you think that they are making 500x more than they deserve then you do not have a proper understanding of economics, or maybe just math.
1000x ? I'm thinking of James McNerney.
"As Boeing's first CEO without a background in aviation, he made the decision to upgrade the 737 series to 737 MAX instead of developing a new model."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney
McNerney:
(Pulls booger out of nose)
"Hey what if we just put bigger engines on it?"
Sycophant Chorus: "Good idea boss!"
Oh please please Matt Taibbi, make this one generally available, it is just too rich & hilarious not to share on Twitter
Share the link and people can get a teaser and then if they subscribe Matt can afford to live and write another day. I found this article via Twitter and subscribed. Not sure if you're implying it should be free in entirety, but I don't think artists and writers should give everything away.
I think the more he shares the more he makes somehow with new people finding him
As always, I already did that first thing - share the link on Twitter. No I am not implying Matt shouldn't have paid subscriptions. Occasionally Matt shares a whole column for free, by popular request.
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.
Matt writes, "No: DiAngelo’s brand of bourgeois Spencerism is ascendant, tipsy with itself and encouraged now by a Republican backlash. At this point there’s nothing we can do but hang on and wait for the dinner to be over, and God knows how long that will take."
Jesus Christ no, Matt! Nihilistic passivity is not the answer. Standing up to these racist bullies and demanding an instantiation of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream is the answer. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Let’s aggressively defend that ideal, not unproductively sneer from behind our computer screens.
Well, to be fair, Matt has written extensively and aggressively about this subject, to the point where many of his readers have been responding with "can we just ignore her and move on?" He's one of the more widely-read writers who's been consistently standing up to, and yes, "calling out," these bullies.
Turns out we can do both.
Join me in sneering.
*unh!
Nice!
For real though, I have always believed in that dream for all of my fellow humans.
Just because people are becoming a Nazi mob that won't change. All of my dealings are above the board and fair to all, always.
There. I'm living proof that DiAngelo's premise is wrong. If I hadn't maintained my own individual integrity, I might have lost myself and not been able to be here to share this ideal with friends, strangers, my offspring, co-workers, the guy delivering sodas who did CPR while we raced to the convenience store on the "person not breathing call" -everyone. Even the person who wasn't breathing.
It's more simple than anyone makes it out to be, and the secret lies in being present in the moment. Really present. Entirely so.
Then, you're real.
Yes, much damage has already been done and much more will continue to be done if we do not actively stand up to these nonsensical racist ideologues.
Popcult has to work itself out in its own way. We who are smart have not solved the problem. Now another kind of people are going to have their shot. It won't be nice, it won't be intelligent, it may lead to all kinds of grief, but by God, when the Lawd gets ready, you got to move. In this case the Lawd being the _vox_populi_.
Do-nothing is Matt's position, take it or leave it. Personally, I'm going for the latter option.
I am reminded to the sort of evangelist preacher who rails relentlessly on in detail about the struggle against the temptations of homosexuality. I think at this point, people recognize that they are describing their own inner demons as if everyone had those urges, thereby revealing themselves. DiAngelo does the same thing with racism, but with even less self-awareness.
DiAngelo writing in painful, cringeworthy detail about the dinner party incident reminds me of a former Episcopal priest I know, defrocked for having a mutually adulterous sexual relationship with a parishioner, who maintains a blog where she writes in detail about the relationship and its fallout despite the fact that it happened decades ago. Supposedly this is part of repentance and truth telling and responsibility taking, but it sure comes across as her savoring the memories and sucking on the bones as long as possible for whatever weird kicks she gets from it.
I agree with the consensus that DiAngelo is cashing in, but I think she's also rubbing herself where it feels good, too, and that's entirely what her tribe of followers is doing as well. Sick shit.
Pointing out that DiAngelo is racist and dumb isn’t going to cut it. We need to be educating people about the origins of critical race theory, which is a fusion of the ideas of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists like Foucault. Only when we have a macrocosmic view of all these ideologies, which have destroyed the American humanities and most of American culture and art, can we repair the damage.
You won't get most of the public to care in the slightest about the origins of this hacky huckster crap. Much easier just to say, when people start going on about "white people this, white people that," that they're being RACIST and to SHUT THE FUCK UP. That would cure this whole raging brain fluke viral contagion a lot quicker than trying to explain to people why Foucault was a raving sadomasochistic lunatic.
You couldn’t be more wrong. That’s what the PC left is doing right now — telling people not to ask questions and have conversations, but rather to just shut the fuck up. People need to be convinced through reason. The solution to a witch hunt is not another witch hunt.
You can't reason people out of opinions they weren't reasoned into. This is a terrible downward spiral. I also don't want a "shut the fuck up/no YOU shut the fuck up" society, but what's to be done about it? The last 18 months have made it crystal clear that most people, even smart ones, hold the views they do not from logic and reason (because those are specific skills which must be deliberately acquired and by and large are no longer taught) but from raw emotion and social pressure. I don't know what to do other than do the best we can to teach our children to reason properly and do the best we can to behave with intellectual integrity, while acknowledging that we do not control the larger context we find ourselves in.
That’s self-pitying nihilism and I have no time for it. If your local school board announces plans to start teaching white kids they have been born with original sin and black kids that they can’t succeed in this country, flood the meeting with sensible parents disclaiming this neo-racism with reason and evidence. If your Congressperson starts talking about their intersectional privilege, attend one of their community meetings and tell them on a livestream how that kind of thinking deprives people of their individual identity and entrenches, rather than diminishes, racism.
Take action. Don’t feel sorry for yourself.
I am not feeling sorry for myself, just discussing reality as I see it. How's your campaign to convince people they're wrong and you're right going? In my life experience that has not ever worked, once, including situations where people can agree on rules of logic and reason. Situations where people believe what they believe because of how they feel: I'm sorry; it's literally impossible to change their minds.
Sure you can fight back, and should, against school boards and woke trainings at work, etc. But all you're doing is galvanizing those who agree with you, and maybe maneuvering out a victory. I'm all for that, but don't kid yourself: you're not going to convince any True Believers that they are wrong. Ever.
More nihilism. Dislodging stupid institutionalized ideas takes time. As to how it’s going, both Chris Rock and Charles Barkley have both recently disowned cancel culture. I’d say it’s progressing.
I think you can draw a line between curriculi that personalize and/or essentialize the concept of racial differences (ie worksheets telling kids to "list ways in which you benefit from or are hurt by whiteness), vs curriculi that merely talk more about the history of racism in America. A lot of parents want CRT because they think it's the latter, but can be moved against the former provided the criticism is not coming from a right wing source.
You are never going to change everyone’s mind. Certainly there will be people who go their graves believing this garbage. Duh.
Inaction and whining are unacceptable. Do what you can and take an active role in fighting bad ideas, or be quiet.
Last thing we need is a epistemological study of Foucault and others. Maybe shut the fuck up is a bit harsh but not that far off. People need to be extricated from this cult with common sense and reason.
Foucault is being taught in American universities across the country. He needs to be widely unmasked as the paltry scholar and intellectual fraud he was.
If we don’t attack the intellectual arguments, the true believers will say, "You just haven’t read Foucault and Robin Diangelo. You need to read the smart people and get smart like me." If we aren’t able to explain why those so-called smart people weren’t smart at all, we’re screwed, ‘cause their explanation will always be that these postmodernist and neo-Marxist "geniuses" are simply over our heads.
If you want to appeal to homespun common sense, go for it. That may work on some people. I am for deploying every weapon we have against these pseudo-intellectual bigots.
Foucault and Robin diAngelo have nothing to do with each other. If Foucault was exhumed from his grave and forced to read White Fragility, he'd instantly throw up. And then point out how it was another example of how the confessional mode of discourse serves as a method of social control.
Foucault was an anti-science, lunatic subjectivist who insisted the Holocaust was caused by the Enlightenment. He insisted that objective reality was unknowable, and reduced all of science to his concept of "biopower" in which things like special relativity are in fact just means of oppressing some and benefitting others with no relation to external, empirically discernible reality. Critical race theory, queer theory and postcolonial theory are saturated in references to Foucault.
Foucault’s entire corpus is drenched in subjectivist power conspiracies. Nothing means anything and objective reality is unknowable, but one thing that is certain is oppressive power forces are everywhere and only you the individual can see them, according to Foucault. Leading critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work is full of Foucault citations.
He also went to his grave in 1984 insisting that AIDS, the virus that killed him, was a social construct. How identifying a virus which mowed down gay men like flies as a social construct, and how demeaning the scientific method which was responsible for the development of anti-retroviral drugs which saved countless gay men’s lives, you’ll have to explain to me.
You should listen to Noam Chomsky’s views on the effect Foucault and postmodernism have had on people in the developing world seeking to cast off the yoke of colonial oppression. It’s difficult to achieve liberation when you’re told liberation is like everything else an illusion and nothing means anything.
https://www.openculture.com/2018/02/noam-chomsky-explains-whats-wrong-with-postmodern-philosophy-french-intellectuals.html
Gloria Steinem has also called out the disastrous effect Foucault and the postmodernists have had on the fight for women’s equality and women’s studies, which under his influence has busied itself with pretentious, nonsensical word games rather than rigorous scholarship concerned with bettering the lot of women.
If you read Jose Guilherme Merquior’s magisterial 1985 review of Foucault’s entire corpus, “Foucault,” you’ll see he had absolutely no competence as a historiographer and that not one word in his books can be trusted.
To quite Camille Paglia, "He knew nothing."
Well 'bout time we got a smart guy on the job. Deployin' some of that there weaponry and showin' us why all them so-called smart people ain't that smart at all. Start with that foucault feller. I hear he's a Frenchman. That right there oughta tell ya he's someone that's always lookin' 'round the room, commencin' to start puttin' on airs! Reckon a smart guy like you could bring down a so-called smart guy like that a peg or two. Homespun common sense is fine with me, I ain't particular one way 'nuther---any which way you's fixin' to lay into them pseudo-intellectual bigots fine with me, fine with me.
Oh ay don’t know ‘bout that, sir. I ain’t gots me such a fine mind muhself, dontcha know.
There is no witch to hunt. I am just beyond sick of hearing white people being put down morning, noon and night. See, all this 'explain the roots of Foucault discourse' crap works on the educated middle classes, if they even care - and a good section of them won't anyway - but the working classes rightly don't give a damn about this polysyllabic crap. Allowing that there is some sort of 'debate' on this shit, like the nutters like DiAngelo have anything to say of any use to humanity whatsoever, just gives it oxygen.
I understand implicitly what the censorious ostensible 'left' have been doing recently to shut people up under the guise of 'extremism' after the Capitol debacle. But anybody who cares enough to research the subject knows where the roots of this psychotic discourse lie in universities, French nihilism, blah blah blah. Make the masses care about that. Or tell some racist fuck to shut up when they start spewing race hate. Know which way I would go.
Working-class people have brains and intellectual curiosity like anyone else. It’s clear you think the solution is shouting at and shaming people, and it’s clear I’m not going to change your mind. Have an amazing day.
Well aware of what working class people think. Working class myself. Which is why I am pointing out that these middle class parlour games will not work with the working class. They are not educated or skilled in them and, quite frankly, have other things to do, like making a living, than talking about dead French philosophers.
Well said.
Yeah, but it would sure be fun to tell them to shut the fuck up. Or, they could all just spend 10 minutes with me in a small locked room and I could provide some old fashioned therapy.
They would certainly learn something about 'white fragility' then. Laughing.
One could walk away and say, "Sorry. I'll have to get back to you on that." That is harder to do, however, in an employer mandated training session. I doubt many people believe this stuff, particularly the way it is packaged by obvious poltroons like DiAngelo. You would have to be deep into a rather dim Human Resources cult to think this is valuable. Contempt is a difficult attitude to channel. Back in high school we used to mock nonsense by going over the top in our participation.
Most people don’t believe it, but are cowed into silence by the cancel mob.
Poltroon means coward. Diangelo is no coward — she’s a brazen grifter. A more apt noun for her is charlatan.
eek! You are right. I used the wrong descriptive term of abuse. I meant "nincompoop". Thanks for straightening me out. It is always important for invective to be on the proper vector.
Don't blame Foucault for any of this! Foucault wrote over and over again about the folly of categorizing people into rigid groups and how doing so allows authoritarians to institute control over more and more of our personal lives. He was dead set against biological essentialism, even in its apparently benign forms. I would argue that reading Foucault's writings on the histories of our concepts of mental illness and sexual orientation, and doing a similar deconstruction of our concept of race, would go a long way toward countering diAngeloism. As a matter of fact several books exist doing just that: "The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter and "The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W Allen both come to mind.
Foucault was an anti-science, lunatic subjectivist who insisted the Holocaust was caused by the Enlightenment. He insisted that objective reality was unknowable, and reduced all of science to his concept of "biopower" in which things like special relativity are in fact just means of oppressing some and benefitting others with no relation to external, empirically discernible reality. Critical race theory, queer theory and postcolonial theory are saturated in references to Foucault.
He also went to his grave in 1984 insisting that AIDS, the virus that killed him, was a social construct. How identifying a virus which mowed down gay men like flies as a social construct, and how demeaning the scientific method which was responsible for the development of anti-retroviral drugs which saved countless gay men’s lives, you’ll have to explain to me.
You should listen to Noam Chomsky’s views on the effect Foucault and postmodernism have had on people in the developing world seeking to cast off the yoke of colonial oppression. It’s difficult to achieve liberation when you’re told liberation is like everything else an illusion and nothing means anything.
https://www.openculture.com/2018/02/noam-chomsky-explains-whats-wrong-with-postmodern-philosophy-french-intellectuals.html
Gloria Steinem has also called out the disastrous effect Foucault and the postmodernists have had on the fight for women’s equality and women’s studies, which under his influence has busied itself with pretentious, nonsensical word games rather than rigorous scholarship concerned with bettering the lot of women.
If you read Jose Guilherme Merquior’s magisterial 1985 review of Foucault’s entire corpus, “Foucault,” you’ll see he had absolutely no competence as a historiographer and that not one word in his books can be trusted.
To quite Camille Paglia, "He knew nothing."
I have found Foucault's concept of biopolitics to be very helpful in explaining to lefty college graduates why the very real abuses done in the name of covid19, as well as the very real abuses done to those labeled "lunatics", are actually bad. He was very sensitive to the ways in which blind worship of "science" (which is constantly evolving--"race science" was quite mainstream in the 1920s-1930s) can lead to mass violations of human rights.
Foucault’s antidote to bad science was epistemological, nihilistic anti-science couched in deliberately inchoate prose. "Nothing means anything and nothing is knowable" is a bland, unsustainable conclusion.
The correct antidote to bad science is good science.
Not every concept in postmodernism isn’t without some truth; it’s just that the handful of concepts that are valid have been lifted from infinitely more insightful writers like Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Friedrich Nietzshe. They offer an enriching read; Foucault’s writing is 90% bullshit and thereby does not.
It's not quite as simple as "bad science" vs "good science". For instance: at what level of viral virulence/deadliness is it acceptable to shut down an entire society? That's not a scientific decision but a moral one. Should medical treatments be forced on people, and if so, what circumstances would make that acceptable? Again, not a scientific question but a moral one, and one that cannot ethically be answered without the input of those who would have the treatment forced on them. We have witnessed politicians repeatedly delegate this moral decisionmaking to "medical experts" and pretend their tyranny is just about "following good science". Any philosopher who can point out the folly of this type of thinking is very valuable to those who care about human freedom.
Foucault had zero concern for human freedom or any other moral, concrete ideal. He was a shameless sophist whose only talent was for self-promotion. He had no clear answers for the highly relevant ethical questions you pose.
Was just using the French philosopher as illustrating a wider point. :)
I find the modern self-loathing, self-flagellating white liberal guilt in America to be deeply, deeply troubling. It's coming from people who increasingly seem to be unhinged. Their whole 'born with the Original Sin of being white and thus worthless' schtick seems to me to be nothing more than a contemporary manifestation of the whole post-slavery notion that there will be a revenge race war in America, and the white folks are going to get murdered when it comes. Charles Manson preyed on the same crap in his own wee cult world.
Reading a grovelling, pandering, pathetic book by some mentally unbalanced snake oil saleswoman (she comes from a fucked-up background) won't save you from a never-coming race hate bullet, penitent and fearful whitey, trust me. Ironically, the anti-white racism that filth like this worthless book is perpetuating is starting to have real-world ramifications in race relations, allowing anti-white sentiment to be spoken much more freely, and this, in turn, ratchets up the race-revenge-based paranoia of the people who read this shit to 'absolve' themselves in the first place. What a finger-licking-good Kentucky Fried cluster fuck.
Unfortunately, this race hate contagion has infected the UK. A top-selling book on this increasingly race-fractured, fractious island (we always take our lead from across the Atlantic) recently was Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by a middle class black English writer named Reni Eddo-Lodge. I read as much of this race-hate-cum-anti-white-apologist book as I could. Ms. Eddo-Lodge posited in the text that the reason that Asian grooming gangs in the UK had picked on mostly white girls was because they had absorbed Western beauty standards, were brainwashed into finding white girls more attractive than brown-skinned girls, and thus raped vulnerable teens accordingly! At that point I roared and threw the fucking book across the room, for obvious reasons. I have no desire to read the twisted-mind ravings of a racist lunatic, no matter how critically feted she may be by fawning Guardian-reading, self-loathing sniffy liberal types.
All this racism, more and more pointed towards white people these days, is just divide-and-conquer swill, to give people a bogeyman (black or white) at different-coloured eye level to rail against, instead of looking up at the elites slowly and joyously strangling us all and fighting back against them. Idiots like Eddo-Lodge and DiAngelo make a bad sociological situation much, much worse, whether by accident or by design. And I don't know or care which one of these it is anymore. There's money in them thar race hate peddling. Sick of it all, top to toe, dick to dorsal.
Look at this woman's Wiki page photo. Note the cracks in the white paint in the background. It's like a naked representation of her psyche. She just looks plain nuts. Would you buy a used race hate ideology from this woman?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_DiAngelo