Links - 23rd June 2019 (1) (General Wokeness)

Black American Group Calls Indo-American Governor Nikki Haley A Race Traitor - "The NAACP, a black race lobby group, is accusing South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley of betraying “people of color.”Nikki Haley’s parents are immigrants from India. Her parents were Indian Sikhs... Haley’s strongest supporters were the TEA Party movement. She received about 4% of the black vote. Less than what David Duke received when he ran for governor of Louisiana.Now the NAACP is demanding that Haley show racial solidarity with the black racial lobby as a fellow “person of color.” They want her to remove the Confederate Battle flag from the statehouse grounds. She has refused... Jealous went on to say that American blacks and Indians were both victims of the white man’s “oppression.” He then claims that Gandhi would want the flag remove.Obviously Jealous knows as little about Indian history as he does about American history. Jealous ignores the fact that the well-known Indian leader was a staunch supporter of racial segregation in South Africa... The first political protests led by Gandhi were in support of racial segregation... the NAACP has already made it clear that the Confederate flag is not all they want. At their anti-Confederate flag rallies, NAACP speakers have demanding the removal of the entire Confederate soldier statue. In fact, the NAACP has covered up the George Washington statue at least two of their rallies. The Confederate flag is only the beginning. The NAACP seeks to obliterate entire monuments."
From 2011. The prediction about taking down monuments was prescient

On Gender and Privilege | egalitarian jackalope - "Just make a few simple changes…
“Black people are the greatest threats to women and children. Saying #NotAllBlacks is just a way to deflect the blame.”
“I hate #NotAllBlacks. All blacks have seen other blacks harass whites. Stop saying #NotAllBlacks and do something about it! #YesAllWhites”
“If black people get upset by #KillAllBlacks, then maybe they could start by stopping raping, abusing, and murdering us?”
And Presto! We have easily recognizable hate speech. This is a handy little litmus test for sexism. Is it a bigoted thing to say about black people? Then it’s a bigoted thing to say about anyone. This is useful because most reasonable people experience an immediate, visceral discomfort at the sight of blatant racism... Just as most black people aren’t robbers, most men aren’t rapists, and assuming otherwise is playing into harmful and discriminatory stereotypes... Both men and black people suffer gross over representation in the homeless population, with men constituting as much as 4/5... men were stopped [by the police] at a rate of 10% (versus women’s 7%), arrested at a stop at a rate of 3.5% (versus 1.4%), had their vehicles searched at a rate of 7.4% (versus 1.6%), and experienced threat or use of force at a rate of 1.8% (versus 1%). For those of you keeping count at home, some of these numbers show a significantly greater disparity than the racial one above. And remember that most of the instances of racial police brutality have targeted males, not females. In fact, according to BJS data, cited in an article about race and police shootings, less than 5% of arrest related deaths between 2003 and 2009 were female... By all means, let’s focus on the 7% of prisoners who aren’t male with hundreds of maddeningly specialized programs nationwide (California alone has 23, and Wisconsin has 10, to give you an idea) which funnel money, time, and effort into helping the proportion of the incarcerated population that may even need it the least. It’s pretty clear where the public priority lies. Can you imagine if these articles and programs existed specifically for the aid and defense of white people?... This could be one of the most pressing gender equality issues of our time, so why is nobody talking about this? I guess catcalling and manspreading are just that much more important."

The rise of the mind-reading left - "The Oxford Union faced heavy criticism last week for extending an invitation to Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist. When asked to defend the decision, the president of the union, Stephen Horvath, explained that it ‘is only through listening to the opinions of others that we can fully understand those opinions’... Dimbleby apparently knows the ghastly truth: ‘It’s for the excitement. Leaders of the union are titillated by the idea of having someone like Bannon speak at their institution.’I am less interested in Dimbleby’s fatuous arguments against freedom of speech, and more in what his article reveals about the intellectually defunct approach of so many on the left. Too often we see polemicists attempting to intuit the motives of those with whom they disagree. Speculation would be one thing, but the certainty which they tend to make these assumptions is chilling... Not only does he claim to have a telepathic insight into the minds of the Oxford Union’s standing committee, he also knows for sure that Bannon is a fascist. As far as I am aware, Bannon has never expressed support for imperialism, the violent suppression of political opposition, or a paramilitary coup against the state. Bannon may be a right-wing nationalist with whom I share little ideological common ground, but I also know that to brand him a fascist would be to open myself up to accusations of historical illiteracy. It is rarely possible nowadays to read an article by a leftist identitarian without the writer at some point divining the secret motives of his or her adversaries. It is the same mentality that has led so many to assume that the Brexit vote was predominantly driven by xenophobia. In a broad poll analysis by the Centre for Social Investigation at the London School of Economics, it was discovered that Leavers were ‘better at characterising Remainers’ reasons than vice versa – something which may be linked to progressives’ greater tendency to disengage from their political opponents’... After the election of Donald Trump, leftists desperately sought to understand why people had not voted in the ‘correct’ way. It soon became clear that a nuanced discussion of the possibilities was to be rejected in favour of groundless assertions. So we had Suzanne Moore diagnosing the majority of American women as suffering from ‘internalised misogyny’ because they voted Republican. It apparently didn’t cross her mind that there might be women out there who simply do not share her political perspective... Has it ever occurred to the likes of Dimbleby, Moore, Penny and Cadwalladr that they might be wrong? If it has, there is little evidence of it in their work"
Leavers understanding Remainers better than vice versa mirrors how conservatives understand liberals better than vice versa

The Left's Accusation That The Right Is Fascist Is Simply Projection - "The paucity of actual Nazis in this country would seem to make Antifa superfluous, but they have a talent for detecting fascists everywhere. Having determined that practically everything and everyone (themselves excepted) is fascist, they spend their free time going about in black shirts smashing things and looking for political opponents to threaten and beat up... Antifa is politics as performative recreation—cosplay and LARPing livened by harassment, vandalism, and moderate violence. The tactics Williamson observed in Portland, “marching through the streets chanting the usual obscenities…blocking traffic, engaging in the casual lawlessness now associated with this city,” are not those of hardened revolutionaries and resistance fighters, but of perpetual adolescents staving off ennui. They are not much of a threat. The police could quickly clear them out if the feckless city leadership gave them permission, and if the GOP really were fascists then the black-mask LARPers would have been long dead. Portland still harbors many well-armed Republicans, some of whom possess enough firepower to singlehandedly gun down all of Antifa. The danger of Antifa is not that they will do much damage themselves, but that they will normalize political violence for those who would be good at it... For all his faults, however, Trump has done little to expand or consolidate presidential power. If Trump appears as a plausible strongman, then the government in general and the presidency in particular have too much power. Much of the progressive anxiety about authoritarianism results from projecting their own philosophy of government onto their political opponents. What they would do to others, they assume others would do to them. Consider the left’s increasingly hostile treatment of religious liberty... The Obama administration even went to the Supreme Court to argue that the federal government can regulate the hiring and firing of religious ministers."

It’s Not Your Imagination: The Journalists Writing About Antifa Are Often Their Cheerleaders - "On February 1, 2017, Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to give a talk about free speech at the University of California, Berkeley. But he was prevented from speaking by a group of 150 or so masked, black-clad members of a then-obscure movement calling itself “Antifa.” The protestors caused $100,000 worth of damage to the campus and injured six people as they threw rocks and Molotov cocktails. Nine months later, again at Berkeley, an “anti-Marxist” rally descended into violence as approximately 100 masked Antifa members harassed journalists and beat rally organizers and attendees... Notwithstanding claims that Antifa is a peaceful, “anti-fascist community-defense group,” it has adopted tactics that often are more violent than those of the right-wing movements that the group opposes. And yet, Antifa often receives media coverage that is neutral or even favorable, with its members’ violence either being ignored by reporters or vaguely explained away as a product of right-wing provocation. What’s more, anecdotal evidence has suggested that many of the mainstream reporters who are most active in covering Antifa also tend to enthusiastically amplify Antifa’s claims on social media... Of all 15 verified national-level journalists in our subset, we couldn’t find a single article, by any of them, that was markedly critical of Antifa in any way. In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying Antifa violence while advancing Antifa talking points, and in some cases quoting Antifa extremists as if they were impartial experts... [Jason] Wilson is not simply a pro-Antifa activist who also happens to write for the Guardian: He actively leverages his role as a regular Guardian writer to promote Antifa, whitewash its violence, and signal-boost its leaders (whom he presents as “experts”)—often under the guise of neutral news reporting."

Online Extremism Researcher Eoin Lenihan Finds Twitter Ties Linking HuffPost, the Guardian, and the SPLC to Antifa - "Lenihan turned to Emily Gorcenski, who "uses Twitter to dox those she deems fascist. Further she created the 'First Vigil' website that processes court documents to share the personal information of suspected members of the far right. In cases where people are found innocent (50%), info is still shared."... Then the researcher turned to the journalists who work for HuffPost, The Guardian, and the SPLC."

Twitter Suspends Analyst Following Article Exposing Ties Between Journalists And Antifa - "Analyst and researcher Eoin Lenihan found himself banned from Twitter following the publication of an article exposing certain ties that mainstream journalists have with Antifa. The article angered Antifa, and in result they mass-reported his account to get him suspended from the social media platform"

Twitter: The World's Most Dangerous Radicalization Engine - "Twitter is radicalizing people in the Western world faster than any other social network. The short but easily shared format allows fake news to travel faster than ever before. Out of context clips, quotes, and headlines result in the rapid deployment of information fragments which mislead and radicalize.Activists use screenshots of clips, quotes, and headlines to make their claims harder to research. People fall for misleading narratives, and the record is hardly ever corrected.Companies develop business models, and activists shape political agendas based on misinformation—lies driven by the likes of Twitter. Scottish comedians are Nazis. All cops are bastards who should die... Consider the time when YouTuber Joey Salads was caught producing race-baiting viral videos as “social experiments.” They were clickbait, but that’s besides the point. It was exactly the kind of content “radicalized digital” needed to further a narrative—it was proof of racism. The two controversial videos, produced during the height of the 2016 elections, were swiftly condemned by the media and are often cited as examples of YouTube gone wrong. VICE called it “the worst kind of smug white racism.” But who is there to call them out? Who watches the watchers? They operate within the mainstream to push lies, smears, and extreme content for money. Publications hire low-tier college grads at dirt wages to write opinionated trash and call it fact—and they have it all down to a formula... how do you keep milking the same cow over and over? You need to radicalize, and the content needs to stay fresh. After all, stale news doesn’t sell.“Is Trump a Racist?” get you a million views but you can’t write the same story twice.Tomorrow you write “Trump IS Racist.”Then “Trump IS THE MOST Racist.”Then “Is Trump Like Hitler?”“Trump IS LIKE Hitler.”“Trump Is WORSE Than Hitler.”"