I'm in my 70s and I often wonder how many people, even old ones, who think that it's still the bad old days view them through the lens of personal experience or stories. Anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that nothing has improved, based upon my lived experience. Is it now perfect? Of course not, but perfection is the enemy of improvement.
I'm in my 70s and I often wonder how many people, even old ones, who think that it's still the bad old days view them through the lens of personal experience or stories. Anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that nothing has improved, based upon my lived experience. Is it now perfect? Of course not, but perfection is the enemy of improvement.
Yeah, there's simply no question that things have improved. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with racial history should find that impossible to deny. It's not even a matter of experience. By any measure you care to name, life is better for black people in America today than it was 60 years ago.
As you say, things aren't perfect today. Far from it. But what drives me mad is that the people who insist on pretending that nothing has change divert time and attention form the issues that would actually improve people's lives.
Read 'Woke Racism' yet? John McWhorter notes that antiracism gets this idea because fighting racism gives them a purpose in life and to acknowledge progress is to detract from the purpose. (Honestly, his book should be called 'Woke Everything' with the subtitle Everything Wrong With The Left). I've never understood this bizarre idea (it's my issue with feminism, natch) as it's clear that all social movements face a loooooong list of things that could be much better. McWhorter notes how much of how 'woke' antiracism (and woke etc.) window dresses and performs, but fails to enact any real change. I have these same arguments with feminists when they piss and moan about 'the patriarchy' but kick the dirt and mumble to themselves when I say things like, "And how do we get women to press charges more against men who rape and assault them rather than sweeping it under the rug and letting him get away with it?" That would help women IMMENSELY but no one wants to talk about that, much easier to 'cancel' someone for cracking a joke from fifteen years ago that isn't 'woke' enough today.
This afternoon I broke open a novel I published on Amazon close to ten years ago and it's so 'unwoke' today - not offensive then, but would probably be considered offensive now, not because I was too ignorant to know what not to say, but because I humorously write about three different religions, New Yorkers, Canadian men, satirize the Israeli/Palestinian land conflict, and feature several non-white characters which, on the face of it should be laudable, but white people writing about anything other than white people gets you canceled so if I were to publish it today I'd probably get murdered on Twitter :) Or perhaps not since JK Rowling in stature I ain't :)
If anyone's regressing, it's the political left and right, both of whom have turned into an army of toxic babies who differ from each other only in who they hate.
Also, not that I'm interested in bothsidesism either, I think describing some of the more worrying aspects of the Left this way is a serious mistake. The Left (by which I mean the fringes, just as the "plurality of murderous conservatives" are the fringes of the Right), and their capture of academia and much of the media, have the potential to do real damage over the next few decades.
For example, the growing culture of celebrating children (mainly girls) as they have their breasts cut off and take hormones that could have serious long-term consequences is entirely a creation of the Left. Race essentialism in schools and workplaces? Almost entirely the Left. Abolishing the police? The Left.
I agree that bothsidesism is a dangerous path (I don't really think Nicole was engaging in this), but so is moral relativism. The problems on the political Left go far beyond a few attention-starved SJWs. Of course there's very good reason to be concerned about the excesses of the Right. But we mustn't let that blind us to the excesses of "our side".
I apologize for the word and I have edited it out. I have no excuses but it's been a pretty rough few weeks.
You'll get no argument from me about Teh Left other than the word; The true American left died in 1939 with the revelation of how things were really working under Stalin. What we call Teh Left mostly strike me as people seeking attention through shock; in a nation without police yeah fewer black men would be shot obediently reaching for driver licenses but cities would be ruled by mobs. Nobody sane wants that. But "defund the police" probably carries the same membership qualification as "Trump won."
Cutting off breasts? Do you have a link for that?
But yes I agree with the symmetry. Conservatism once meant strong defense and fiscal moderation; now it means cruelty and hate. American leftist politics used to be about fair wealth distribution and equality of of opportunity; now it's about pronouns and bathrooms and defunding the police.
In my mind there is no more significant issue in the world than the mass extinction we are heading into. Seeing taxidermied specimens in the Smithsonian labeled "extinct" at age ten actually made me throw up. Yet todays so-called "leftists" care more about transgenders' bathroom use than the disappearance of wildlife.
"Cutting off breasts? Do you have a link for that?"
Hey Chris, sorry for the delay, Substack isn't sending me notifications for new posts for some reason..
Here are two stories that sprang to mind just because I saw them recently, but as Nicole says, it's not hard to find them on Google. Just search for "top surgery."
For 'cutting off breasts' just Google it. There's plenty of information out there. I've been investigating the transgender movement from both sides - I've been radicalized by Medium's final takedown, LOL! Also I was arguing with Elle "I Hate The Patriarchy' Beau who was more interested in defending the rights of chicks with dicks than in protecting women from those same dicks.
The left is why the right will probably win. At the end of the day the right can put all their internal disagreements aside and rally together for a common cause (The Republicans have pretty much mastered this, and it involved trampling all over individual rights and *demanding* everyone work together. It may suck but it Gets Shit Done even if you don't like the shit they're doing.) The left, on the other hand, eats its own and cancels its own...because the left has shame and the right doesn't.
That's why I hew closer to the Murky Middle, where you don't always like the company you keep. As, it seems, do you.
Good point about how America has adopted - let's call it what it is - female genital mutilation. That's been bothering me a lot too, and it IS violence against girls (maybe boys too...not sure if they're mutilating boys yet surgically but I know they're being harmed by hormone blockers et al.)
OK, I realize this is the first time I've seen you use this, and so what I'm about to say may not apply to you personally.
But I'm getting really tired of other people who, whenever they hear any criticism of the left and the right, throw out 'bothsideism' or 'false equivalence' as if that was a magical error handkerchief on the ground.
Typically, I'm not even trying to say which side is worse nor that they are the same (for reasons noted below), but they imagine I'm trying to say both sides are exactly the same, and they use that like a strawman, distracting from my real points. I want to save society from the excesses of both, not to referee a moral p*ssing match between left and right.
Both sides are dangerous in different ways which are like apples and oranges. Trying to weigh in about who is worse is usually a way to distract from looking at something uncomfortable. "Well, the other side is worse, so shut up". I don't really care about weighing apples and oranges, I want to understand the different pitfalls of each side.
The right, today, is closer to violence, albeit not likely on a large scale. The left may be closer to soft fascism through control of institutions, and could well become violent in the future (they might use proxies to commit the violence of course). The dangers are different but neither becomes less dangerous because the other side is dangerous too!
Both sides have authoritarian tendencies, but the neo-progressive left's has in my opinion more proclivity towards totalitarianism - not just wanting power to enrich some elite at the expense of the neglected poor, but wanting to control every human interaction at a granular level. Pronouns, vocabulary, attitudes - stamping out all wrongthink. At least today, the right doesn't seem likely to want political commisars everywhere to make sure everybody thinks the right thoughts, but I do see the seeds of that kind of control on the left (only for the most noble of purposes of course).
So I'm very willing to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of extremists on both sides as separate issues.
And we need to pay attention to the way that the extremes on one side both inflame and justify the extremes on the other. These two sides bring out the worst on the other side. It's too common to hear "why are you criticising a tiny number of crazies on our side when the other side has more and worse crazies'. And the other side uses the same tactics. We have to break that cycle if we want to regain a sane society.
And in most cases, the characterization of 'bothsidesism' and the accusations of 'false equivalence' have been, at least in my experience, PART of that unconscious attempt to shield one dysfunction by pointing at the other.
I pretty much agree with a lot of what you say, and I guess I only part ways, slightly, with the notion that we shouldn't point out what's going wrong on the *other* side - which in my case is pointing out what's wrong on my own, the left. Just as the right is wrong in thinking that everything wrong with America is the left, the left likewise points fingers and wallows in its own self-righteousness. I don't tend much toward criticizing the right because it's rather a lot like fish in a barrel, and everyone else is doing, most people much better. I criticized the right more when I still lived in the States, stuck with Reaganism/Bushism.
However the left needs to be reminded of its own imperfections, and they need to hear it from one of their own, which is why I liked writing for Medium. Lots more extremists there to challenge - the man-haters (I was big on challenging victim feminism), the whitey-haters, the virtue signallers. Challenging the deeply flawed and scientifically-challenged trans movement is what ultimately, I believe, got me kicked off, although I can't swear antiracist snowflakes didn't have a hand in it.
That's where I think I have something more original to add - not bashing Trump, or COVIDiots, or MAGAt terrorists, but in pointing out how the left contributes to political/social divisiveness and how we need to get over some of our conceits, like that we don't have elements every bit as subject to ludicrously unscientific arguments (like that biological sex means nothing and that you can declare yourself one or t'other based on the way you 'feel') and that we don't subscribe to dumbass conspiracy theories either (plenty of stupid-ass anti-vaccine arguments swallowed uncritically on the left, including in the black community, which is why, when some elements complain about the lopsided effect COVID infections and deaths have on the black community, and healthcare irregularities and disparities and yadda yadda yadda (all valid) I pop up to say something annoying like, "Well, could y'all please knock it off with the damn Tuskegee experiments crap? NO BLACK PERSON IS DYING OF COVID WHILE VAXXED UNLESS THEY HAVE SOME CO-MORBIDITY OR OTHERWISE COMPROMISING HEALTH PROBLEM!"
It's too easy to think of your own side as holy and forget, or just blithely ignore, overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I'm not much for Christianity these days but I thought Jesus put it very well about removing the log from one's own eye first.
Actually, we are pretty much on the same page, and I agree with all that you have said.
I did not mean to give any impression that "we shouldn't point out what's going wrong on the *other* side". It was more about the tendency to avoid consideration of one's own side by changing the subject to the more comfortable topic of the other side's faults.
I am today somewhat of a rogue progressive liberal, who strongly dissents from the direction that neo-progressives have taken the movement. And I direct a lot of my critical thinking at the neo-progressive left ("woke", "successor ideology", "PC", "the elect"), because as you say, there is more need for it, at least where I live. Critiques of the right (even exaggerated critiques) are the water we swim in here. Voices from the left or center, with measured criticism of the neo-progressive ideology (or religion as McWhorter frames it) are in serious undersupply by comparison. Also, having been on the progressive left for half a century, I know the roots of this subculture, and hope to be able to speak to it.
I sense a substantial authoritarian undercurrent to the current neo-progressive approach, so I am concerned about where that is leading if they get and use more power to remake the world in their vision. But I also fear that they are going to trigger an over-reaction which brings right wing authoritarianism into power. If voices more in the middle cannot bring the neo-progressives into more sanity, then force from much further to the right may do so. Or the attempt from the right will trigger & justify the latent authoritarianism of the left.
So I agree about the need to pay attention to the log in our own eye, not just the mote in the eye of the other. (Except I'd say they are both logs, albeit differently shaped ones).
I will note that in addition to citing the long ago Tuskegee experiment as a reason to avoid medical care today, another supposed gross injustice often cited in the same breath is the case of Henrietta Lacks. She was not publicly credited as the cell donor from whom a line of research cell cultures was derived, and she herself did not give permission nor receive compensation (other than free health care). But that's hardly a logical reason to not get vaccinated! She was not harmed in any way, and did not receive bad care.
I used to be very much in favor of digging out "the seamy underside of democracy" and exposing every historical injustice, with the belief that this would help us improve the future. I am coming to doubt that it's having a net positive effect, because every example is being exaggerated and weaponized to support a narrative of perpetual oppression; it's not used to rebalance and reflect, but to gain power and twist the popular understanding, albeit in a different direction. I think that I may be another in the long list of casualties from failed expectations of rationality.
Part of what makes the Right so dangerous is its religious fervor; fundamentalist Christianity, which has permeated the right since the earliest Reagan days (they helped elect him, after Jimmy Carter turned out to be a huge disappointment), has grown more corrupt and far more dangerous. They hold their noses and support Trump because, well, progressivism is a way worse sin I guess! The Left has been entirely subsumed by the *same* sort of religious fervor, albeit for a secular religion without gods or afterlives. Read Woke Racism, and you''ll see what's wrong with the Left in the ways Steve notes below. The Left can get violent too - look to its history in the '60s and '70s. What do you think will happen if Trump steals the next election? I'm not sure we can trust the Left to *not* get violent, although I don't know they're at the point yet where they'd attempt to riot on the Capitol like the right.
There's nothing wrong with 'bothsidesism' - looking at both sides. I think what you object to is 'false equivalency' - the notion that one side is just as bad as the other. With the political US divide today, the right is unquestionably more violent but I'm not sure the left isn't as equally *capable*, and just haven't gotten there yet. When it comes to religious extremism, I'd put them both on an even plane there. The excesses of racist-tinged CRT (not, itself, a racist field of study, but you can make *anything* racist) as well as what the trans nuts are doing to screw kids up about gender and sex, are both pretty toxic agendas (feminism has fallen behind, but its excessives regard men as the enemy, rather than white people or 'cis-het' people). The left is adopting the EXACT SAME TACTICS the right has been utilizing for four decades, going in at the ground level - school boards, city councils - which is how Christian fudnamentalists baked their anti-science, anti-history, toxic agenda into American life (and the left is no better - the two sides merely disagree on which science to support, and which to blow off). I don't like what the left has become which is what has driven me closer to the centre.
Maybe you could use a little more 'bothsidesism' because you sound like you're just as blind to the excesses of your side as the MAGAts are to the excesses of their own side.
Sometimes I wonder how many people's 'bad experiences', whether it's living in a relentlessly 'racist' or 'patriarchal' culture (women) or a 'transphobic' culture (trans folk, and mostly transwomen) are perhaps inviting the hostility, consciously or not, with their own, subtle or not. There was a black writer on Medium before I left whose stories on racism she experienced living in another country (she's never, to my knowledge, lived in the US) who began reading the negative, victim-centred literature (Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, etc.) and began sounding far more whiny and self-victimizing and a little bit racist herself. I began to feel sorry for her white husband, and I wonder whether the racist 'microaggressions', which sound a bit exaggerated now, are because her country is all that racist or whether maybe she's got a chip on her shoulder the size of a dump truck.
The funny part about human beings is that while no one likes to *be victimized*, many of us sure do like *feeling* victimized. Acknowledging progress interferes with the victim narrative that gives you a reason to blame everyone except yourself for your problems.
"There was a black writer on Medium before I left whose stories on racism she experienced living in another country (she's never, to my knowledge, lived in the US) who began reading the negative, victim-centred literature (Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, etc.) and began sounding far more whiny and self-victimizing and a little bit racist herself"
This wouldn't be Rebecca Stevens would it?ЁЯШЕ At some point she blocked me, even though we've never even had a conversation, but the overwhelming positive was that I no longer had to see her articles in my feed.
John McWhorter has been talking about this problem recently. Victimhood is a perfectly human weakness. White, black, gay, straight, male, female, we're all susceptible to the temptation to say "poor me". This is why we often note that there's so much overlap between a certain type of antiracist and feminist and LGBT activist.
But when we're not only given permission to play the victim, but are rewarded for doing so, including financially in the case of writers on Medium, the temptation takes on a whole new level.
I'm not sure if you *are* talking about Rebecca, but what drove me mad about her "work" is the fact that there was never anything productive. Not a single relationship or work story or trip to a supermarket that wasn't tarnished by racism or her lack of "privilege". There was never even the slightest attempt to understand or portray nuance. I simply don't believe that her life is really like this. She simply edits out anything that portrays being black as anything other than a living hell.
But her thoroughly mediocre writing got the most attention when she wrote moronic, divisive nonsense. So that very quickly became all she ever wrote. It's this really toxic negative spiral.
Medium has gone completely overboard in coddling the victim claims. I was kicked off for telling one of those "nonbinary" people that I would not refer to him/her as "they." NOTHING about the authenticity of the claim to intermediate gender, which privately I believe to be complete BS, just that my respect for grammar would not allow "they."
Medium called this "bullying" and banned me. Again. And with the changes to their partner program I won't be writing there anymore.
ROTLFMAO! Thank you for sharing this story. Welcome to the club, O My Brother :) I got banned after I defended Dave Chappelle and criticized trans activists for being misogynist and snowflake. They'd already suspended two of my previous articles, and I predicted they'd suspend *me* next. Which they did. Having already psychologically disengaged from Medium after the second article takedown, it wasn't too hard to stick to my intention to refuse to beg for my account back. Wrote a whole article about it on my blog. https://www.nicolechardenet.com/post/bye-bye-medium-com
I take it you got reinstated at least once? I'm done with Medium.
They don't reinstate. Appeals are always rejected. And my last one was at the complaint of one of the sickest and angriest people I have run across online, and I have been online since the dialup networks like Compuserve.
I mostly write about the software industry but it is hopeless.
Then I'm glad I didn't give them the satisfaction of sucking (transwoman, LOL) d**k to try to get my account back. They're taking a very strict line in regards to *ANY* challenge to the trans community. Thou. Shalt. Not. Question.
Yeah, it was Rebecca. I actually liked reading her stories when I first joined Medium, they seemed quite real, a view of racism I don't see myself, obviously. But later, it seemed like she was stretching to find the racism and shortly before I left it seemed to me that she was looking to US (slave) history to feel victimized and outraged and *that's not even her history*. She's from Africa originally and I have a little less patience with Africans pissing and moaning about a practice the US eliminated *over 150 years ago* when in many parts of Africa today they STILL practice the slave trade - in fact, an article in the last few years described Africa as once 'again' the epicentre of the global slave trade. Africans who dislike American slavery really need to go home and do something about slavery TODAY.
Although I've noticed that most people complain about Marley K the most. Marley is to antiracism what Jessica Valenti is to feminism - the biggest whiners and complainers out there, but maybe once a year they produce something rational and worth reading. Because of that, I muted rather than blocked both of them to keep their horse shit out of my feed (but in case it ever came to my attention that they'd written something worth reading, I wanted to remain a bit open.) I've never had an interaction with either myself.
Like you, I don't think Rebecca's life is as bad as she makes it out to be. She's an unhappy woman for reasons neither of us know why, but I'm pretty sure it ain't because she's subjected to a constant stream of racism (in Switzerland?) I guess Judson Vereen really called her out on that recently - someone sent me the article - and I was glad to see him take on the fact that she's middle class, has a good job, lives in a country with a decent standard of living. I'm beginning to feel real sorrow for her white husband, because I'll bet she's getting to be a real pain in the ass to live with.
One thing I've noticed about Medium three months away: I don't miss it that much. It took up a *lot* of my time, and while I felt a little 'cut off' at first I now realize how much I'd fallen into the Medium 'groove' of writing a certain way to feed the audience that wants what it wants. I have to write a little differently for Vocal, where your story has to be approved first. Their standards are similar to Medium's but not the same and in fact there's less leeway to be as extreme. Medium really does allow a lot of hateful content, my experience being a helluva lot of blanket man-hating and also plenty of whitey-hating. Extremism does sell and Medium is okay with paying for it, but only if you hate on the 'right' people.
Going to test Vocal with a rewrite of one of the articles Medium took down earlier last year. Taking out the snarkiness, the criticisms of the trans community, and focusing more on why I think 'transracialism' might be a good idea, based on some positive things I see coming out of its close cousin, the better parts of the trans movement. Let's see if Vocal can handle that...at least I won't get a strike mark against me if they don't approve it, I either rewrite it to their liking or I delete it :)
"I actually liked reading her stories when I first joined Medium, they seemed quite real, a view of racism I don't see myself, obviously."
Yeah, that's just it. I think with Rebecca it's a question of exposure. The first couple of stories of hers I read struck me as a little sensationalist, but I though, "sure, she's a different person, maybe her experiences have simply differed from mine." I believed she was at least being genuine and was willing to excuse some of the hyperbole as fear or a difference in personality.
But then there's the next one. And the next one. And each time it gets a little harder to take her seriously. Especially when she starts talking about the way black people in general are treated, and it's obvious that what she's saying simply isn't true. Eventually any sympathy I might have had is completely eroded because it's obvious she's just a liar.
This is a microcosm of racial discourse at the moment. Especially on social media. And it's doing exactly the same thing to people who I see becoming increasingly racist in their thinking. They didn't start out like that in most cases. Some I personally know started out perfectly reasonable and engaged. But the constant drip, drip of bullshit, coupled with being told how evil and racist they are all the time, has led some of them to reflexively deny racism even in situations where it's obvious, or to generalise about black people in response to the generalisations about white people.
Increasingly often I find myself having arguments with people because they've just assumed I hold a bunch of views that I don't, because they're the views "black writers" hold. People like Rebecca and Marley are doing real, measurable damage.
Good luck with Vocal, I haven't given them a go yet but I'll be interested to hear your experiences with them.
"The funny part about human beings is that while no one likes to *be victimized*, many of us sure do like *feeling* victimized. Acknowledging progress interferes with the victim narrative that gives you a reason to blame everyone except yourself for your problems."
There is some degree of "liking to feel victimized" but I believe that much of what we call victimhood cultures is about gaining power over others through exaggerated exposition of one's victimhood, rather than about actually wallowing in one's pain. If it didn't pay off in power, without that incentive, I believe a lot of it would die down. But if some professor having published something you don't like, and you can claim it makes you feel 'unsafe' to enter a campus where they work, the goal is less to feel sorry about yourself so much as to get that professor shut down - power.
And yes, I've come to believe that the Prime Directive for neo-progressives is "Reinforce the Narrative at all costs". Promoting the Narrative is their source of power, so any dissent which might undercut it at all must be suppressed. Research that shows a lessening of bias needs to be deep sixed, but anything which can be interpreted as supporting a narrative of oppression is to be highlighted.
One example was when at a certain stage of facial recognition the software was better at recognizing white faces than Black, this was portrayed as embodied white supremacy. The systemic racism in which white programmers were steeped was presumed to have leaked through their fingertips into a racially biased algorithm. The truth was that there are many more white faces available for training, and they on average have better contrast than the available Black faces, so the early iterations were better at one. Over time, by artificially biasing the training data not to proportionately represent the population, and general improvements, it will even out more. But suppose that it had for similar technical reasons been better at recognizing Black faces at that stage. I have no doubt that would be considered systematic racism as well - designed to detect Black criminal more than white. Being more easily identified by surveillance is not necessarily a privilege, after all. The reliable thing in common with either scenario is - Reinforce the Narrative at all costs. Find a way to accentuate the narrative of oppression, suppress anything which weakens that narrative. In the narrative lies power. Protect the narrative.
(I have more sympathy for what I consider the roots of that approach than it might sound. While I believe it has become dogmatic and corrosive today, I think that in part it's a bastardization of the call for moral integrity from sources like Dr King. However, it has mutated into something more malign today - a divisive tribalism rather than a unifying message among other things.)
There is a young Black content creator on YouTube whom I appreciate - Kimi Kitati. She grew up in several countries of Africa, then moved to the US. In college she got way into the woke ideology. But she describes how miserable it was to be constantly looking for and reacting to microaggressions and racial bias everywhere all day long.
It was so draining that at some point she decided to forgive (one of her heroes is Desmond Tutu), and a weight was lifted off her shoulders. She started seeing nuance and the good in people. She also has an intellectual analysis, but the deeper change was in her heart.
Putting this in my own terms (which she might or might not agree with), she found that the psychological payoffs of neo-progressivism were the booby prize; the real prize was in authentic connection and engagement. Still trying to make the world better, but not with those poisoned tools.
Never doubt that neo-progressivism has its psychological payoffs; once hooked on them deeply, it's very hard to escape. Her story inspires me with hope.
You might like to check it out for a contrast to Rebecca in terms of how she has evolved with exposure to the first world. Her take just feels so much more psychologically *healthy* as well as politically constructive.
Thanks for the rec! Yes, I will definitely check out Kim Katati. Sounds quite interesting. I often wonder how much people make *themselves* miserable with their increasingly twisted views of the world. I'd bet my bottom dollar people like Rebecca are at this point either consciously or unconsciously acting in such a way to invite hostility from others. I see this same dynamic from victim feminists who treat men the way Rebecca treats white people. The narrative is *always* about oppression, and you can always spin it to be proof of oppression, as you noted elsewhere about the 'racism' of facial recognition systems. Thanks again, now I have something new to listen to while I make dinner!
I'm in my 70s and I often wonder how many people, even old ones, who think that it's still the bad old days view them through the lens of personal experience or stories. Anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that nothing has improved, based upon my lived experience. Is it now perfect? Of course not, but perfection is the enemy of improvement.
Yeah, there's simply no question that things have improved. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with racial history should find that impossible to deny. It's not even a matter of experience. By any measure you care to name, life is better for black people in America today than it was 60 years ago.
As you say, things aren't perfect today. Far from it. But what drives me mad is that the people who insist on pretending that nothing has change divert time and attention form the issues that would actually improve people's lives.
Read 'Woke Racism' yet? John McWhorter notes that antiracism gets this idea because fighting racism gives them a purpose in life and to acknowledge progress is to detract from the purpose. (Honestly, his book should be called 'Woke Everything' with the subtitle Everything Wrong With The Left). I've never understood this bizarre idea (it's my issue with feminism, natch) as it's clear that all social movements face a loooooong list of things that could be much better. McWhorter notes how much of how 'woke' antiracism (and woke etc.) window dresses and performs, but fails to enact any real change. I have these same arguments with feminists when they piss and moan about 'the patriarchy' but kick the dirt and mumble to themselves when I say things like, "And how do we get women to press charges more against men who rape and assault them rather than sweeping it under the rug and letting him get away with it?" That would help women IMMENSELY but no one wants to talk about that, much easier to 'cancel' someone for cracking a joke from fifteen years ago that isn't 'woke' enough today.
This afternoon I broke open a novel I published on Amazon close to ten years ago and it's so 'unwoke' today - not offensive then, but would probably be considered offensive now, not because I was too ignorant to know what not to say, but because I humorously write about three different religions, New Yorkers, Canadian men, satirize the Israeli/Palestinian land conflict, and feature several non-white characters which, on the face of it should be laudable, but white people writing about anything other than white people gets you canceled so if I were to publish it today I'd probably get murdered on Twitter :) Or perhaps not since JK Rowling in stature I ain't :)
If anyone's regressing, it's the political left and right, both of whom have turned into an army of toxic babies who differ from each other only in who they hate.
Bothsidesism is bad. Please quit it.
You're comparing a tiny group of pathetic and attention-starved SJWs to the substantial plurality of murderous conservatives.
Why would anyone want to read a book like that, forewarned? I didn't read Jonah Greenberg either.
"Contemptible"? Be nice Chris.
Also, not that I'm interested in bothsidesism either, I think describing some of the more worrying aspects of the Left this way is a serious mistake. The Left (by which I mean the fringes, just as the "plurality of murderous conservatives" are the fringes of the Right), and their capture of academia and much of the media, have the potential to do real damage over the next few decades.
For example, the growing culture of celebrating children (mainly girls) as they have their breasts cut off and take hormones that could have serious long-term consequences is entirely a creation of the Left. Race essentialism in schools and workplaces? Almost entirely the Left. Abolishing the police? The Left.
I agree that bothsidesism is a dangerous path (I don't really think Nicole was engaging in this), but so is moral relativism. The problems on the political Left go far beyond a few attention-starved SJWs. Of course there's very good reason to be concerned about the excesses of the Right. But we mustn't let that blind us to the excesses of "our side".
I apologize for the word and I have edited it out. I have no excuses but it's been a pretty rough few weeks.
You'll get no argument from me about Teh Left other than the word; The true American left died in 1939 with the revelation of how things were really working under Stalin. What we call Teh Left mostly strike me as people seeking attention through shock; in a nation without police yeah fewer black men would be shot obediently reaching for driver licenses but cities would be ruled by mobs. Nobody sane wants that. But "defund the police" probably carries the same membership qualification as "Trump won."
Cutting off breasts? Do you have a link for that?
But yes I agree with the symmetry. Conservatism once meant strong defense and fiscal moderation; now it means cruelty and hate. American leftist politics used to be about fair wealth distribution and equality of of opportunity; now it's about pronouns and bathrooms and defunding the police.
In my mind there is no more significant issue in the world than the mass extinction we are heading into. Seeing taxidermied specimens in the Smithsonian labeled "extinct" at age ten actually made me throw up. Yet todays so-called "leftists" care more about transgenders' bathroom use than the disappearance of wildlife.
"Cutting off breasts? Do you have a link for that?"
Hey Chris, sorry for the delay, Substack isn't sending me notifications for new posts for some reason..
Here are two stories that sprang to mind just because I saw them recently, but as Nicole says, it's not hard to find them on Google. Just search for "top surgery."
https://www.tiktok.com/@archiebeshort/video/7027517844942294277
https://twitter.com/StandingforXX/status/1472988554125058049?s=20
For 'cutting off breasts' just Google it. There's plenty of information out there. I've been investigating the transgender movement from both sides - I've been radicalized by Medium's final takedown, LOL! Also I was arguing with Elle "I Hate The Patriarchy' Beau who was more interested in defending the rights of chicks with dicks than in protecting women from those same dicks.
The left is why the right will probably win. At the end of the day the right can put all their internal disagreements aside and rally together for a common cause (The Republicans have pretty much mastered this, and it involved trampling all over individual rights and *demanding* everyone work together. It may suck but it Gets Shit Done even if you don't like the shit they're doing.) The left, on the other hand, eats its own and cancels its own...because the left has shame and the right doesn't.
That's why I hew closer to the Murky Middle, where you don't always like the company you keep. As, it seems, do you.
Good point about how America has adopted - let's call it what it is - female genital mutilation. That's been bothering me a lot too, and it IS violence against girls (maybe boys too...not sure if they're mutilating boys yet surgically but I know they're being harmed by hormone blockers et al.)
OK, I realize this is the first time I've seen you use this, and so what I'm about to say may not apply to you personally.
But I'm getting really tired of other people who, whenever they hear any criticism of the left and the right, throw out 'bothsideism' or 'false equivalence' as if that was a magical error handkerchief on the ground.
Typically, I'm not even trying to say which side is worse nor that they are the same (for reasons noted below), but they imagine I'm trying to say both sides are exactly the same, and they use that like a strawman, distracting from my real points. I want to save society from the excesses of both, not to referee a moral p*ssing match between left and right.
Both sides are dangerous in different ways which are like apples and oranges. Trying to weigh in about who is worse is usually a way to distract from looking at something uncomfortable. "Well, the other side is worse, so shut up". I don't really care about weighing apples and oranges, I want to understand the different pitfalls of each side.
The right, today, is closer to violence, albeit not likely on a large scale. The left may be closer to soft fascism through control of institutions, and could well become violent in the future (they might use proxies to commit the violence of course). The dangers are different but neither becomes less dangerous because the other side is dangerous too!
Both sides have authoritarian tendencies, but the neo-progressive left's has in my opinion more proclivity towards totalitarianism - not just wanting power to enrich some elite at the expense of the neglected poor, but wanting to control every human interaction at a granular level. Pronouns, vocabulary, attitudes - stamping out all wrongthink. At least today, the right doesn't seem likely to want political commisars everywhere to make sure everybody thinks the right thoughts, but I do see the seeds of that kind of control on the left (only for the most noble of purposes of course).
So I'm very willing to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of extremists on both sides as separate issues.
And we need to pay attention to the way that the extremes on one side both inflame and justify the extremes on the other. These two sides bring out the worst on the other side. It's too common to hear "why are you criticising a tiny number of crazies on our side when the other side has more and worse crazies'. And the other side uses the same tactics. We have to break that cycle if we want to regain a sane society.
And in most cases, the characterization of 'bothsidesism' and the accusations of 'false equivalence' have been, at least in my experience, PART of that unconscious attempt to shield one dysfunction by pointing at the other.
Let's stop that.
I pretty much agree with a lot of what you say, and I guess I only part ways, slightly, with the notion that we shouldn't point out what's going wrong on the *other* side - which in my case is pointing out what's wrong on my own, the left. Just as the right is wrong in thinking that everything wrong with America is the left, the left likewise points fingers and wallows in its own self-righteousness. I don't tend much toward criticizing the right because it's rather a lot like fish in a barrel, and everyone else is doing, most people much better. I criticized the right more when I still lived in the States, stuck with Reaganism/Bushism.
However the left needs to be reminded of its own imperfections, and they need to hear it from one of their own, which is why I liked writing for Medium. Lots more extremists there to challenge - the man-haters (I was big on challenging victim feminism), the whitey-haters, the virtue signallers. Challenging the deeply flawed and scientifically-challenged trans movement is what ultimately, I believe, got me kicked off, although I can't swear antiracist snowflakes didn't have a hand in it.
That's where I think I have something more original to add - not bashing Trump, or COVIDiots, or MAGAt terrorists, but in pointing out how the left contributes to political/social divisiveness and how we need to get over some of our conceits, like that we don't have elements every bit as subject to ludicrously unscientific arguments (like that biological sex means nothing and that you can declare yourself one or t'other based on the way you 'feel') and that we don't subscribe to dumbass conspiracy theories either (plenty of stupid-ass anti-vaccine arguments swallowed uncritically on the left, including in the black community, which is why, when some elements complain about the lopsided effect COVID infections and deaths have on the black community, and healthcare irregularities and disparities and yadda yadda yadda (all valid) I pop up to say something annoying like, "Well, could y'all please knock it off with the damn Tuskegee experiments crap? NO BLACK PERSON IS DYING OF COVID WHILE VAXXED UNLESS THEY HAVE SOME CO-MORBIDITY OR OTHERWISE COMPROMISING HEALTH PROBLEM!"
It's too easy to think of your own side as holy and forget, or just blithely ignore, overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I'm not much for Christianity these days but I thought Jesus put it very well about removing the log from one's own eye first.
Actually, we are pretty much on the same page, and I agree with all that you have said.
I did not mean to give any impression that "we shouldn't point out what's going wrong on the *other* side". It was more about the tendency to avoid consideration of one's own side by changing the subject to the more comfortable topic of the other side's faults.
I am today somewhat of a rogue progressive liberal, who strongly dissents from the direction that neo-progressives have taken the movement. And I direct a lot of my critical thinking at the neo-progressive left ("woke", "successor ideology", "PC", "the elect"), because as you say, there is more need for it, at least where I live. Critiques of the right (even exaggerated critiques) are the water we swim in here. Voices from the left or center, with measured criticism of the neo-progressive ideology (or religion as McWhorter frames it) are in serious undersupply by comparison. Also, having been on the progressive left for half a century, I know the roots of this subculture, and hope to be able to speak to it.
I sense a substantial authoritarian undercurrent to the current neo-progressive approach, so I am concerned about where that is leading if they get and use more power to remake the world in their vision. But I also fear that they are going to trigger an over-reaction which brings right wing authoritarianism into power. If voices more in the middle cannot bring the neo-progressives into more sanity, then force from much further to the right may do so. Or the attempt from the right will trigger & justify the latent authoritarianism of the left.
So I agree about the need to pay attention to the log in our own eye, not just the mote in the eye of the other. (Except I'd say they are both logs, albeit differently shaped ones).
I will note that in addition to citing the long ago Tuskegee experiment as a reason to avoid medical care today, another supposed gross injustice often cited in the same breath is the case of Henrietta Lacks. She was not publicly credited as the cell donor from whom a line of research cell cultures was derived, and she herself did not give permission nor receive compensation (other than free health care). But that's hardly a logical reason to not get vaccinated! She was not harmed in any way, and did not receive bad care.
I used to be very much in favor of digging out "the seamy underside of democracy" and exposing every historical injustice, with the belief that this would help us improve the future. I am coming to doubt that it's having a net positive effect, because every example is being exaggerated and weaponized to support a narrative of perpetual oppression; it's not used to rebalance and reflect, but to gain power and twist the popular understanding, albeit in a different direction. I think that I may be another in the long list of casualties from failed expectations of rationality.
Part of what makes the Right so dangerous is its religious fervor; fundamentalist Christianity, which has permeated the right since the earliest Reagan days (they helped elect him, after Jimmy Carter turned out to be a huge disappointment), has grown more corrupt and far more dangerous. They hold their noses and support Trump because, well, progressivism is a way worse sin I guess! The Left has been entirely subsumed by the *same* sort of religious fervor, albeit for a secular religion without gods or afterlives. Read Woke Racism, and you''ll see what's wrong with the Left in the ways Steve notes below. The Left can get violent too - look to its history in the '60s and '70s. What do you think will happen if Trump steals the next election? I'm not sure we can trust the Left to *not* get violent, although I don't know they're at the point yet where they'd attempt to riot on the Capitol like the right.
There's nothing wrong with 'bothsidesism' - looking at both sides. I think what you object to is 'false equivalency' - the notion that one side is just as bad as the other. With the political US divide today, the right is unquestionably more violent but I'm not sure the left isn't as equally *capable*, and just haven't gotten there yet. When it comes to religious extremism, I'd put them both on an even plane there. The excesses of racist-tinged CRT (not, itself, a racist field of study, but you can make *anything* racist) as well as what the trans nuts are doing to screw kids up about gender and sex, are both pretty toxic agendas (feminism has fallen behind, but its excessives regard men as the enemy, rather than white people or 'cis-het' people). The left is adopting the EXACT SAME TACTICS the right has been utilizing for four decades, going in at the ground level - school boards, city councils - which is how Christian fudnamentalists baked their anti-science, anti-history, toxic agenda into American life (and the left is no better - the two sides merely disagree on which science to support, and which to blow off). I don't like what the left has become which is what has driven me closer to the centre.
Maybe you could use a little more 'bothsidesism' because you sound like you're just as blind to the excesses of your side as the MAGAts are to the excesses of their own side.
Sometimes I wonder how many people's 'bad experiences', whether it's living in a relentlessly 'racist' or 'patriarchal' culture (women) or a 'transphobic' culture (trans folk, and mostly transwomen) are perhaps inviting the hostility, consciously or not, with their own, subtle or not. There was a black writer on Medium before I left whose stories on racism she experienced living in another country (she's never, to my knowledge, lived in the US) who began reading the negative, victim-centred literature (Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, etc.) and began sounding far more whiny and self-victimizing and a little bit racist herself. I began to feel sorry for her white husband, and I wonder whether the racist 'microaggressions', which sound a bit exaggerated now, are because her country is all that racist or whether maybe she's got a chip on her shoulder the size of a dump truck.
The funny part about human beings is that while no one likes to *be victimized*, many of us sure do like *feeling* victimized. Acknowledging progress interferes with the victim narrative that gives you a reason to blame everyone except yourself for your problems.
"There was a black writer on Medium before I left whose stories on racism she experienced living in another country (she's never, to my knowledge, lived in the US) who began reading the negative, victim-centred literature (Kendi, DiAngelo, Coates, etc.) and began sounding far more whiny and self-victimizing and a little bit racist herself"
This wouldn't be Rebecca Stevens would it?ЁЯШЕ At some point she blocked me, even though we've never even had a conversation, but the overwhelming positive was that I no longer had to see her articles in my feed.
John McWhorter has been talking about this problem recently. Victimhood is a perfectly human weakness. White, black, gay, straight, male, female, we're all susceptible to the temptation to say "poor me". This is why we often note that there's so much overlap between a certain type of antiracist and feminist and LGBT activist.
But when we're not only given permission to play the victim, but are rewarded for doing so, including financially in the case of writers on Medium, the temptation takes on a whole new level.
I'm not sure if you *are* talking about Rebecca, but what drove me mad about her "work" is the fact that there was never anything productive. Not a single relationship or work story or trip to a supermarket that wasn't tarnished by racism or her lack of "privilege". There was never even the slightest attempt to understand or portray nuance. I simply don't believe that her life is really like this. She simply edits out anything that portrays being black as anything other than a living hell.
But her thoroughly mediocre writing got the most attention when she wrote moronic, divisive nonsense. So that very quickly became all she ever wrote. It's this really toxic negative spiral.
Medium has gone completely overboard in coddling the victim claims. I was kicked off for telling one of those "nonbinary" people that I would not refer to him/her as "they." NOTHING about the authenticity of the claim to intermediate gender, which privately I believe to be complete BS, just that my respect for grammar would not allow "they."
Medium called this "bullying" and banned me. Again. And with the changes to their partner program I won't be writing there anymore.
ROTLFMAO! Thank you for sharing this story. Welcome to the club, O My Brother :) I got banned after I defended Dave Chappelle and criticized trans activists for being misogynist and snowflake. They'd already suspended two of my previous articles, and I predicted they'd suspend *me* next. Which they did. Having already psychologically disengaged from Medium after the second article takedown, it wasn't too hard to stick to my intention to refuse to beg for my account back. Wrote a whole article about it on my blog. https://www.nicolechardenet.com/post/bye-bye-medium-com
I take it you got reinstated at least once? I'm done with Medium.
They don't reinstate. Appeals are always rejected. And my last one was at the complaint of one of the sickest and angriest people I have run across online, and I have been online since the dialup networks like Compuserve.
I mostly write about the software industry but it is hopeless.
Then I'm glad I didn't give them the satisfaction of sucking (transwoman, LOL) d**k to try to get my account back. They're taking a very strict line in regards to *ANY* challenge to the trans community. Thou. Shalt. Not. Question.
Yeah, it was Rebecca. I actually liked reading her stories when I first joined Medium, they seemed quite real, a view of racism I don't see myself, obviously. But later, it seemed like she was stretching to find the racism and shortly before I left it seemed to me that she was looking to US (slave) history to feel victimized and outraged and *that's not even her history*. She's from Africa originally and I have a little less patience with Africans pissing and moaning about a practice the US eliminated *over 150 years ago* when in many parts of Africa today they STILL practice the slave trade - in fact, an article in the last few years described Africa as once 'again' the epicentre of the global slave trade. Africans who dislike American slavery really need to go home and do something about slavery TODAY.
Although I've noticed that most people complain about Marley K the most. Marley is to antiracism what Jessica Valenti is to feminism - the biggest whiners and complainers out there, but maybe once a year they produce something rational and worth reading. Because of that, I muted rather than blocked both of them to keep their horse shit out of my feed (but in case it ever came to my attention that they'd written something worth reading, I wanted to remain a bit open.) I've never had an interaction with either myself.
Like you, I don't think Rebecca's life is as bad as she makes it out to be. She's an unhappy woman for reasons neither of us know why, but I'm pretty sure it ain't because she's subjected to a constant stream of racism (in Switzerland?) I guess Judson Vereen really called her out on that recently - someone sent me the article - and I was glad to see him take on the fact that she's middle class, has a good job, lives in a country with a decent standard of living. I'm beginning to feel real sorrow for her white husband, because I'll bet she's getting to be a real pain in the ass to live with.
One thing I've noticed about Medium three months away: I don't miss it that much. It took up a *lot* of my time, and while I felt a little 'cut off' at first I now realize how much I'd fallen into the Medium 'groove' of writing a certain way to feed the audience that wants what it wants. I have to write a little differently for Vocal, where your story has to be approved first. Their standards are similar to Medium's but not the same and in fact there's less leeway to be as extreme. Medium really does allow a lot of hateful content, my experience being a helluva lot of blanket man-hating and also plenty of whitey-hating. Extremism does sell and Medium is okay with paying for it, but only if you hate on the 'right' people.
Going to test Vocal with a rewrite of one of the articles Medium took down earlier last year. Taking out the snarkiness, the criticisms of the trans community, and focusing more on why I think 'transracialism' might be a good idea, based on some positive things I see coming out of its close cousin, the better parts of the trans movement. Let's see if Vocal can handle that...at least I won't get a strike mark against me if they don't approve it, I either rewrite it to their liking or I delete it :)
"I actually liked reading her stories when I first joined Medium, they seemed quite real, a view of racism I don't see myself, obviously."
Yeah, that's just it. I think with Rebecca it's a question of exposure. The first couple of stories of hers I read struck me as a little sensationalist, but I though, "sure, she's a different person, maybe her experiences have simply differed from mine." I believed she was at least being genuine and was willing to excuse some of the hyperbole as fear or a difference in personality.
But then there's the next one. And the next one. And each time it gets a little harder to take her seriously. Especially when she starts talking about the way black people in general are treated, and it's obvious that what she's saying simply isn't true. Eventually any sympathy I might have had is completely eroded because it's obvious she's just a liar.
This is a microcosm of racial discourse at the moment. Especially on social media. And it's doing exactly the same thing to people who I see becoming increasingly racist in their thinking. They didn't start out like that in most cases. Some I personally know started out perfectly reasonable and engaged. But the constant drip, drip of bullshit, coupled with being told how evil and racist they are all the time, has led some of them to reflexively deny racism even in situations where it's obvious, or to generalise about black people in response to the generalisations about white people.
Increasingly often I find myself having arguments with people because they've just assumed I hold a bunch of views that I don't, because they're the views "black writers" hold. People like Rebecca and Marley are doing real, measurable damage.
Good luck with Vocal, I haven't given them a go yet but I'll be interested to hear your experiences with them.
"The funny part about human beings is that while no one likes to *be victimized*, many of us sure do like *feeling* victimized. Acknowledging progress interferes with the victim narrative that gives you a reason to blame everyone except yourself for your problems."
There is some degree of "liking to feel victimized" but I believe that much of what we call victimhood cultures is about gaining power over others through exaggerated exposition of one's victimhood, rather than about actually wallowing in one's pain. If it didn't pay off in power, without that incentive, I believe a lot of it would die down. But if some professor having published something you don't like, and you can claim it makes you feel 'unsafe' to enter a campus where they work, the goal is less to feel sorry about yourself so much as to get that professor shut down - power.
And yes, I've come to believe that the Prime Directive for neo-progressives is "Reinforce the Narrative at all costs". Promoting the Narrative is their source of power, so any dissent which might undercut it at all must be suppressed. Research that shows a lessening of bias needs to be deep sixed, but anything which can be interpreted as supporting a narrative of oppression is to be highlighted.
One example was when at a certain stage of facial recognition the software was better at recognizing white faces than Black, this was portrayed as embodied white supremacy. The systemic racism in which white programmers were steeped was presumed to have leaked through their fingertips into a racially biased algorithm. The truth was that there are many more white faces available for training, and they on average have better contrast than the available Black faces, so the early iterations were better at one. Over time, by artificially biasing the training data not to proportionately represent the population, and general improvements, it will even out more. But suppose that it had for similar technical reasons been better at recognizing Black faces at that stage. I have no doubt that would be considered systematic racism as well - designed to detect Black criminal more than white. Being more easily identified by surveillance is not necessarily a privilege, after all. The reliable thing in common with either scenario is - Reinforce the Narrative at all costs. Find a way to accentuate the narrative of oppression, suppress anything which weakens that narrative. In the narrative lies power. Protect the narrative.
(I have more sympathy for what I consider the roots of that approach than it might sound. While I believe it has become dogmatic and corrosive today, I think that in part it's a bastardization of the call for moral integrity from sources like Dr King. However, it has mutated into something more malign today - a divisive tribalism rather than a unifying message among other things.)
There is a young Black content creator on YouTube whom I appreciate - Kimi Kitati. She grew up in several countries of Africa, then moved to the US. In college she got way into the woke ideology. But she describes how miserable it was to be constantly looking for and reacting to microaggressions and racial bias everywhere all day long.
It was so draining that at some point she decided to forgive (one of her heroes is Desmond Tutu), and a weight was lifted off her shoulders. She started seeing nuance and the good in people. She also has an intellectual analysis, but the deeper change was in her heart.
Putting this in my own terms (which she might or might not agree with), she found that the psychological payoffs of neo-progressivism were the booby prize; the real prize was in authentic connection and engagement. Still trying to make the world better, but not with those poisoned tools.
Never doubt that neo-progressivism has its psychological payoffs; once hooked on them deeply, it's very hard to escape. Her story inspires me with hope.
You might like to check it out for a contrast to Rebecca in terms of how she has evolved with exposure to the first world. Her take just feels so much more psychologically *healthy* as well as politically constructive.
Thanks for the rec! Yes, I will definitely check out Kim Katati. Sounds quite interesting. I often wonder how much people make *themselves* miserable with their increasingly twisted views of the world. I'd bet my bottom dollar people like Rebecca are at this point either consciously or unconsciously acting in such a way to invite hostility from others. I see this same dynamic from victim feminists who treat men the way Rebecca treats white people. The narrative is *always* about oppression, and you can always spin it to be proof of oppression, as you noted elsewhere about the 'racism' of facial recognition systems. Thanks again, now I have something new to listen to while I make dinner!