Bret Weinstein has though. IIRC he was told precisely that, repeatedly, and at full volume, by an outraged gang of unstable Evergreen students.
This strikes me as one of those unprovable assertions that allows the speaker almost infinite latitude to move the goalposts so before I go any further with this, I’d just like to ask; what would I need to show you to prove this wrong?
An at least semi-mainstream “left-wing” (at this point I’d settle for “Teen Vogue”) that says anything remotely like “everyone hates white men” or “Fuck white men” without it being obvious and blatant satire. Preferably a piece that is more than one person venting their own frustration with privileged men in their lives.
I’ll spot you one: “Stupid White Men” by Michael Moore kinda says that. Mostly as a joke, kind of not. But that was a decade and a half ago.
So, maybe something like this?
The biggest problem with the IDW is that they are solely a group of reactionary culture warriors. They don’t stand for anything but milking a “those blue-haired feminists/students have gone too far” gravy train of publicity and patreon dollars. A movement of hucksters.
Hmm.
“I don’t know if I can trust [del]white people[/del] white Trump supporters and apologists (because they are consistently incredibly racist) and that means we can’t really be friends” = “Fuck white men”?
(No, seriously, that’s the thesis of the article: )
But the deepest rift is with the apologists, the “good” Trump voters, the white people who understand that Mr. Trump says “unfortunate” things but support him because they like what he says on jobs and taxes. They bristle at the accusation that they supported racism, insisting they had to ignore Mr. Trump’s ugliness. Relying on everyday decency as a shield, they are befuddled at the chill that now separates them from black people in their offices and social circles. They protest: Have they ever said anything racist? Don’t they shovel the sidewalk of the new black neighbors? Surely, they say, politics — a single vote — does not mean we can’t be friends.
I do not write this with liberal condescension or glee. My heart is unbearably heavy when I assure you we cannot be friends.
The same is true, unfortunately, of those who hold no quarter for Mr. Trump but insist that black people need to do the reaching out, the moderating, the accommodating. Imagine the white friend during the civil rights era who disliked blacks’ being beaten to death but wished the whole thing would just settle down. However likable, you could not properly describe her as a friend. Sometimes politics makes demands on the soul.
In fact, the author goes out of her way to say, “Don’t misunderstand: White Trump supporters and people of color can like one another,” and defines “friendship” in terms of trust and equality.
Like, don’t get me wrong, I can understand how someone might look at this article, read the headline, stop reading, and get offended.
The grift is encouraging that.
The Daily Wire (Shapiro’s website) ran not one but two articles talking about this, one of which ran under the lovely title, “Shocking New York Times Op-Ed Suggests Children Should Be Segregated By Race”, which is exactly as honest as one would expect from Ben Shapiro’s website. It even ends the article by appealing to Martin Luther King, to fill out my bingo card of “shitty right-wing race grievances”. Fox News ran articles and segments on this. You can probably find more. None of these articles grapple with the point of the article; all of them simply say, “Look at this racist black person” with the implication being that people who complain about racism from Trump supporters are crazy. In fact, here’s a pull quote:
But that’s not all. Although Yankah could probably find plenty of ideological allies among white leftists, he believes that the probability of encountering someone who believes differently from him is far too high, so long as he and his children continue to interact with anyone of a different race. So despite their best efforts, those who vote Democrat are among Yankah’s enumerated enemies.
[INDENT] The same is true, unfortunately, of those who hold no quarter for Mr. Trump but insist that black people need to do the reaching out, the moderating, the accommodating. Imagine the white friend during the civil rights era who disliked blacks’ being beaten to death but wished the whole thing would just settle down. However likable, you could not properly describe her as a friend. Sometimes politics makes demands on the soul.[/INDENT]
That is literally not what the quote says and anyone who reads it can tell (emphasis mine) but go off I guess.
And, in case anyone’s keeping score, this is one angry academic posting in the New York Times that they will teach their child to be cautious around white people because white people are often incredibly racist. Meanwhile, Breitbart and The Federalist literally had “Black Crime” tags until the mainstream media rightfully pointed out how fucking sick that is. So perhaps a certain degree of anger is warranted. Hence why I said:
…Because that’s exactly what this is. Someone whose life has and will continue to be affected by racism grousing about racism, and being honest with her child about racism.
Much like the Holy Roman Empire, the Intellectual Dark Web is three lies in one. They’re not intellectual in the least, not dark in any sense of the word (come back when y’all are running orphan websites only accessible by Tor, fuckmooks !), and “web” is a misnomer for a disparate collection of mostly unrelated cunts who each try to somehow make their personal racism/sexism/reactionarism seem palatable, edgy or justified. Which mostly they really, but really don’t.
Intellectual Dark Webs become more popular during times of dizzying technological and social change, such as what we’re living through now. It’s not really a movement but a social/political phenomenon that looks both backward and forward - backward in the sense that there are certain fundamental “truths” or cultural tenets which make a culture “strong” and that somewhere along the way, our culture forgot what those “truths” were and now society is threatening to throw itself over a cliff. Simultaneously, the IDW and its variants dabble in futurism as well, offering a seemingly rational, academic path forward toward building a highly modernist culture that embraces and even leans on a specific historical description of who ‘we’ are. It’s no coincidence that they embrace the latest technology and become particularly adept at using technology to spread their influence. It’s not just an effective way to spread their gospel, but in so doing it reinforces the notion that they’re embracing a forward-thinking and enlightening kind of social and political transformation.
In and of itself, there’s nothing particularly threatening about people who don’t necessarily explicitly advocate hatred or violence but just “controversial” views. The unfortunate tendency of movements like these, however, is that they tend to deal in a zero-sum world.
I like Harris.
The piece isn’t as discerning as you imply. To the author, all white people are a danger to his kids. He writes:
“As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible”
This necessarily implies the following:
1). All white people are a certain ‘base level’ of racist, and that level is unacceptable.
2). It’s acceptable to make judgements about people’s character and intentions based on nothing more than their race.
Your reading of the article is so absurdly charitable that I’m not sure there’s much point citing further examples. After all, why should I bother if you’re just going to hand wave away the racism anyway? Yeah, he spends a lot of time talking about Trump supporters, but he also explicitly says he’ll teach his kids to distrust all white people!
The fact is, if you reversed the races you’d have something that wouldn’t be out of place on Richard Spencer’s blog. If you think a white person can only be offended by this if he stopped reading at the headline then I honestly don’t know what evidence would persuade you.
Wanna defend the tweet where known torture supporter Sam Harris says that milkshaking is “mock assassination”? Or the one where he praises insane neo-nazi conspiracy theorist Stefan Molyneux?
“Milkshaking”?
I would be happy to rebut whatever complaint you have about that tweet if you first articulate your problem with it. (You have a tendency to expect people to read your mind or for everyone to see your reactions to things as self-evident.)
I’m only slightly familiar with Bret Weinstein, so I don’t know if he has rhetorical skeletons in his closet that I would not be willing to defend. But what was quoted there is spot on. Here’s an edited version of something I wrote in 2017 on the subject:
What people like BPC either don’t get, or are disingenuously strawmanning, is that it’s not a question of straight white cismen being oppressed the way women, gays, and/or POC have been. It’s the refusal by the “cool kids” to embrace them that is the problem. Human nature is to react to being mocked and dismissed by the cool kids with “Well then, fuck the cool kids! Where can I find a social clique that makes fun of THEM?” And the alt-right is only happy to oblige. :smack:
It may be “fragile”, it may be petulant, but it is human nature—and we are talking about insecure adolescent boys growing up in a disconcertingly vertiginous social environment. We should be the ones reaching out with a steadying hand and offering our welcome before the alt-right can worm their tentacles in. I suppose a philosophical debate can be had about whether this is the morally right move, but it is quite plainly the politically savvy, pragmatic thing to do.
Throwing milkshakes at people. It’s become kind of a fad among members of the activist left to throw milkshakes at right wing figures. Here’s Nigel Farage getting one.
Past a certain point I have to wonder if you have some serious mental disorder and I’m being mean by expecting you to just get why a tweet praising, signal-boosting, and normalizing a neo-nazi is a bad look, or why it’s both insensitive and so stupid that it’s funny to compare “throwing a milkshake at someone” to an assassination attempt. If that’s the case, I apologize. As someone with mild autism, I’ve been there, reading intent and subtext can be hard. But if that’s not your excuse, I’m kinda at a loss.
So…you can’t, then. Okay. [shrug]
I literally just did. It’s all right there. You seem to have trouble parsing simple statements. Let’s see if this is any better for you.
Sam Harris signal-boosted, normalized, and praised a neo-nazi.
Do you need further elaboration on why that’s bad? If so, the problem is you.
I just had a look at that Molyneux tweet. It’s from 2012. I had a look back to see what kind of videos Molyneux was putting out back then. Judging by the titles, they’re mostly about Libertarianism, Bitcoin, and small government, with a bit of anti-feminism stuff thrown in for good measure. What was Molyneux doing seven years ago that should’ve made Harris think twice before retweeting him?
The fundamental point here has very little to do with the particulars of milkshakes, or who specifically is targeted by them. (I don’t know or care who was milkshaked in this case: if Sam actually praised his ideas as opposed to standing up for his right to express them, that must have been a different tweet than the one I saw—in which case please link me to it.) Sam Harris, like Dibble’s favorite philosopher John Stuart Mill, sees the free and unfettered expression of ideas—even bad ones, even shockingly heinous ones, and maybe even especially those—as the fundamental democratic human right from which all others flow. I agree wholeheartedly with them. You? Do not. Which is your right! But it makes niggling over specifics entirely beside the point.
Present to me an actual idea Harris has PERSONALLY expressed, or EXPLICITLY endorsed, which you consider wrongheaded or worse, and I will probably defend it. (Or maybe not: I don’t agree with him about everything. Just nearly everything.)
But this commutative property of guilt because he stuck up for a (quite possibly despicable) person’s right to freely express his (perhaps odious) opinions? Nah. That dog won’t hunt.
ETA: While composing, I see a reference to Sam retweeting someone. I thought we were talking about the milkshaking-as-mock-assassination tweet. But I will again say that endorsing a single statement someone makes is not tantamount to taking responsibility for everything else they may have said in the past, or will say in the future. That way lies madness.
From Budget Player Cadet’s sig:
Note that this is the second time the United States has run concentration camps.