Is Complaining About Street Sexual Harassment Racist? - "Three years before anti-street-sexual-harassment group Hollaback! released its controversial video — in which a white woman walks New York and receives more than 100 catcalls in one day — the women-of-color-led group Girls for Equality produced a similar one. One of these videos has 33 million views. The other, fewer than 30,000. “I mean is everyone only paying attention because there’s a white woman in Hollaback’s video?” Crunk Feminist Collective’s Brittney Cooper asked yesterday. If it does take a white woman appearing to be victimized by black and Latino men to get people to care about street sexual harassment — which happens everywhere, to women of all races, at the hands of men of all races — that’s depressing. One small silver lining is that the backlash was loud and swift, yielding a much more interesting conversation that included race and class. Hollaback! was immediately slammed for editing white catcallers out of their video — the reason, the group explained, was that “a lot of what they said was in passing” or off-camera or drowned out by sirens. (Put differently: Men of all races catcall, but white men don’t get caught.)... “Should current laws dealing with harassment be strengthened to include catcalling”? But the racial optics of the viral video meant that this criminalization debate had troubling implications. Being a black man in New York City already means you will be treated like a criminal. Are catcalls so bad that white women want to add them to the list of nonviolent reasons these men are disproportionately (and often violently) harassed by the police? Still, one video doesn’t tell us how street sexual harassment breaks down by race or class or geography. And the Hollaback! app — which tracks and maps users’ reports of street sexual harassment — doesn’t collect data on race, either. (That would be racist, the creators said.) But it does reveal that most of the smartphone-enabled reports come out of gentrifying neighborhoods in lower Manhattan and West Brooklyn. This appears to confirm what the video’s optics suggested: The people most loudly complaining about catcalls are the ones most insulated from more serious problems of racial profiling and economic inequality. After all, getting catcalled in a gentrifying neighborhood isn’t just a reminder that because someone is young and female her body is up for grabs (besides, that happens in subtler ways all the time). It foremost means being forced to acknowledge some of the people who lived there in a time before gut renovations and organic bodegas and speakeasies. A gentrifier like me can always move back to the quiet, catcall-free suburbs; the guy who hangs outside my subway stop all day probably can’t. So when he tells me I look beautiful today, I say “thank you” instead of tattling on an app. It’s never led to an escalation that made me uncomfortable and, as a result, I’ve been hesitant to complain about catcalls as an issue. But that may not be true for all women — especially the victims of street harassment not represented by Hollaback!’s narrow take. If men are “brazen enough to harass white women and their protected femininities on the street,” Cooper wrote, “what won’t they do to cis and trans women of color, whose womanhood is structurally devalued?” For trans women of color, street sexual harassment is often a matter of life and death. It’s their safety and comfort that gets lost when we allow street sexual harassment to be cast as a threat to white gentrifiers. And it’s their harassment I risk condoning when I opt to rank the injustices of the world rather than confront a universal one, in spite of my guilt and discomfort. “We ain’t fighting for a world in which brothers get to be patriarchs,” Cooper wrote. “That’s not what my anti-racist analysis will be used in the service of.”"
I like how the assumption is that men of all races harass equally (yet, of course, we cannot assume that women harass the same as men, since women are not a socially acceptable group to hate on); apparently "in passing" "harassment" is as bad as normal "harassment". Either that or white privilege involves the universe playing sirens to drown out your "harassment"
In the progressive hierarchy, women (as a whole) are above (below) "minority" men
Maybe this just show the fragility of rich liberal women, since they complain disproportionately
William Wolfe on Twitter - "When people sanctimoniously say "Do better" to those not completely bought into to their progressive ideology, they really just mean "Agree with me.""
Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 on Twitter - "“I love saying n—ger fa—got” Newly surfaced video of Ethan Klein (@h3h3productions) shows him using racist & anti-gay slurs. Klein deleted his old interview with @jordanbpeterson yesterday, claiming the professor is hateful & a “gateway to alt-right.”"
Razib 🥥 Khan on Twitter - "many of us come from families with a multi-generational legacy of being in scientific fields, so it is really bizarre to encounter the idea that science is deeply (as opposed to contingently) 'western' at university...…"
Helen Pluckrose is on a Tw!tter break. Yes, really on Twitter - "I am deeply ashamed that so many non-Western medical professionals and engineers (mostly from India. Pakistan & Nigeria) come here to fulfil a need for them and then have to deal with this orientalist bullshit about STEM being a white & Western “way of knowing.”
For anybody who is not entirely clear on this: Science, medicine, engineering, tech, maths = definitely not Western inventions.
Shitty Critical theories of social Justice rooted in some German neo-Marxist & more French postmodern ideas = definitely a Western invention.
If you genuinely want to “decolonise” everything, stop trying to make non-westerners assimilate to western critical theories of race & gender. While you’re at it, stop trying to make the majority of westerners who also think it harmful, essentialist bullshit conform to it too."
Bertrand Cooper on Twitter - ""non-white ways of knowing" often seems to carry the implication that non-whiteness is intrinsically progressive, as if modeled off of 21st century values. It reminds me of when white family members of mine found yoga and then fetishized India/Hinduism into a personal fairytale."
Free Black Thought on Twitter - "If it's not Western, it's morally pure."
Liberals just hate the West/white people
Meta to bring in mandatory distances between virtual reality avatars - "In December a user testing Horizon Worlds, a VR app owned by Zuckberg’s Meta business, complained of being groped online and called for a protective bubble around their avatar, or digital representation of themselves"
Thread by @wrong_speak on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I grow tired of people using black people like a political football, throwing us from one cause to another to manufacture outrage for policy change & to appear virtuous. You people are our villains pretending to be our saviors...
Since the verdict of Kyle Rittenhouse, there has been an abundance of people, especially white leftists, who feel the need to invoke black people because they don't like the way things turned out. If you are this person, fuck you. I normally don't speak this harshly but you people always grab microphones to speak for black people as if you are our saviors. You believe you're these virtuous heavenly soldiers here to save us weak black people, when you're the exact devil we don't need. You are our villains. Let me say this again, you are our fucking villains. You are the type of people who record themselves giving homeless people $20 so you can try to trick people into believing you're a good person. God knows what you really are. He can't be swindled.
Every time you people stand up for "black people", you're not helping. You constantly interfere by manufacturing narratives that are unproductive for many black people and you constantly group us together like we are monolithic beings. The fact that you think you NEED to carry signs and wear T-Shirts letting us know that you think our lives matter is the problem. You're not convincing anyone else but yourselves. You people are selfish, manipulative elitists and every time you attempt to use black people as a manipulative tool to get something you want politically, I will be sure to call you out. We do not need saving, you do. We do not need your help but you sure as hell need some help. Quit transferring your insecurities onto a group of people. And quit using black people for your political motives & your Twitter clap backs because it only displays your low character."
Meme - "Woke people talking about how they are "The Revolution' *TV Camera filming graffiti: 'Obey The Rules'"
Terrika on Twitter - "So Tom Brady had alllllll weekend to confirm his retirement but instead decides to wait to the first day of Black History Month to make it all about him… see why I don’t f*** with Brady… 🤷🏾♀️"
Meme - "Blacks calculating how they lost control of the world after being the Egyptians, Jews, Moors, Celts, inventing everything and building the USA | WE WUZ KINGS"
Meme - "Alexander the Great spends his entire life with aman named Hephaestion and when Hephaestion dies, Alexander cuts off his hair, bans music, crucifies the doctor and burns down the temple to the god of healing.
Historians: Like, are they friends?"
Comments (elsewhere): ""Oh my god why are men so afraid to show emotions?"
When men show emotions:"
"do they not know what alexander did for his horse?"
Meme - PhilosophiCat @Philosophi_Cat: "I follow LOTR as a topic on Twitter and 90% of the suggested posts are from the alphabet soup crowd insisting that Frodo and Sam were gay for each other because sexual degenerates can't understand the difference between love and sex.
Sam literally pined for Rosie the entire time and the first thing he did when he got back was marry her, Sam following through to help Frodo out of a sense of duty and loyalty (something else degenerates can't understand) in no way indicates anything homoerotic."
Do you love or hate your flag? Welcome to a long-running artistic controversy - "a group of artists in New Zealand called Mercy Pictures hosted a show, at a gallery of the same name, entitled People of Colour. The show consisted of hundreds of pictures of small painted flags (not the flags themselves) representing multiple countries, groups, organisations, identities, fictional places and projects. I was asked by the artists to write a short text about flags, which I was happy to do. I thought the show sounded interesting: what would be the effect of having representations of all these different flags alongside one another? Would their individual meaning be heightened or diminished? What might we learn about tribalism and belonging? What effect does removing symbols from their political context tell us about how art might tackle questions of belonging, nationhood and the symbolic realm as such? Somewhat predictably, in this era of manufactured outrage, the artists (and I, for that matter, despite having no role in the idea for the show) were accused of causing “great offense” because paintings of Nazi and white supremacist flags were included alongside paintings of Maori flags. The gallery was vandalised, and anyone who had anything to do with the show was pilloried, insulted and attacked, despite no one involved being any more a member of the far-Right than they were part of the UN Blue Helmets, or a resident of Narnia. As the writer James Robb neatly summarised it: “The provocative juxtaposition of the flags was the point of the show, raising questions about the symbolism and emotions human beings invest in flags, and the sensitivities, misunderstandings and offence caused when other people have different attitudes to a flag.” More recently, another flag show Down Under caused similar “upset”. Tasmania’s Dark Mofo festival pulled a piece titled Union Flag by the well-respected Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. The work, which consists of a Union Flag soaked in the freely-donated blood of people from colonised territories, is bluntly, but very obviously, addressing questions of history, violence, occupation and exploitation. But Santiago is Spanish, and therefore, according to the work’s detractors, somehow on the side of the coloniser, and thus the work must go. This logic is so racist it defies belief: no one who has ever been a member of a country that has ever committed violence – and let’s face it, there are virtually no states for which this is the case – can occupy a critical role in relation to their country’s past. How is history supposed to progress if all human beings are atavistic, and no one can ever do anything but represent their own tribe, however made-up that belong might be? What happened to our dreams of universalism and internationalism? Today’s identitarian logic allows no other kinds of collective being; you might think that we’re united in being human, but that’s Enlightenment reasoning, and therefore forbidden. We are almost all united as workers, but then we’re forcibly divided by race and sexual identity. It used to be understood that this kind of division best served those in power, but today consumerist and atomised distinctions rule. Even though First Nations donors gladly participated in Sierra’s project, their desire counts for nothing: art today, his detractors imply, can only be understood on the most literal level, and audiences must be protected from having to think too much. By that logic, fiction might as well be banned, and all cultural expression be strictly in accordance with the “identity” of the artist. If anyone is offended, anywhere, by anything, or pretends to be, everything is off! This is art as a mere extension of the worst kind of politics."
Macy Gray calls for replacing 'dated, divisive' American flag - "Singer Macy Gray is calling for a new United States flag that is a little more diverse. Gray, a popular soul and R&B singer, said the current flag no longer represented “all” Americans. “The American flag has been hijacked as code for a specific belief. God bless those believers, they can have it,” Gray, 53 wrote in an editorial for MarketWatch. “Like the Confederate, it is tattered, dated, divisive, and incorrect. It no longer represents democracy and freedom. It no longer represents ALL of us. It’s not fair to be forced to honor it. It’s time for a new flag.” Gray suggested a new flag with “off white” bars and stars that were white alongside ones that were black and brown to reflect America’s diversity. “The Smithsonian documents that the ‘white’ stripes represent purity and innocence. America is great. It is beautiful. Pure, it ain’t. It is broken and in pieces.”"
We're still told that liberals don't hate their countries
Pimlico Academy headmaster caves in to protesting students who burned 'racist' Union Flag - "A headteacher who caved to demands by pupils to take down the “racist” Union flag has faced backlash from MPs. Daniel Smith, headteacher of Pimlico Academy provoked protests from students after amending the schools uniform policy to ban hairstyles which block the view of others. The policy also stipulated that hijabs worn by Muslim students shouldn’t be “too colourful”... Students staged a walk out on Wednesday in protest of the uniform policy and the school’s failure to adequately respond to the Black Lives Matter movement."
In the culture war era, we can no longer afford to write off flag waving as un-British - "a lot of the people who claim to be indifferent to flags are strikingly selective in their indifference. If you were truly left cold by the Union flag, why would you need to keep saying so? And why would you feel impelled to poke fun at those who like to see it flapping about? Even more striking is the flag snobs’ selectiveness about which flags they disdain. Union flags and St George’s crosses are fair game. But how often do they extend their vexilo-scepticism to, say, the blue-and-gold EU banner? All week, BBC comedians, Twitter poseurs and a handful of Labour politicians have been mocking the idea of flying the Union flag permanently from government buildings – an idea supported, according to a YouGov poll on Thursday, by 58 to 19 per cent of the electorate at large – but no one, as far as I can tell, has complained about the fact that the 12-star flag flies permanently from EU buildings. It isn’t really bits of dyed cloth per se that rouse the cleverdicks’ scorn, of course. It isn’t even nationalism: they’re fine with nationalism when it’s Palestinian, Venezuelan or Irish. No, their real quarrel is with the United Kingdom... There is nothing new about the peculiar disdain British intellectuals feel for their own country. It is, though, a bizarre affliction. Few countries have done more to advance the causes of toleration, equality before the law or representative government. If, down the centuries, you had to pick somewhere to be born poor, female or in a religious minority, you wouldn’t hesitate for long. Still, if you are determined to find fault, you will. You will convince yourself that we were monstrous slavers, and overlook the fact that it was our altruistic campaign that eliminated a previously near-universal trade. You will come to believe that it was really the Soviet Union that defeated the Nazis – forgetting that they were on the same side for the first third of the war. You will maintain, despite a mass of polling data showing the opposite, that we are an unusually racist and intolerant people. Your Angloscepticism might lead you into some strange alliances. Jeremy Corbyn made excuses for almost anyone who was sufficiently anti-British – Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA, even Vladimir Putin, whose reactionary, militaristic and authoritarian regime he would, in any other circumstance, have detested. In a milder form, Angloscepticism makes people overlook the flaws in, say, Nicola Sturgeon, or Ursula von der Leyen. It’s not exactly that they get misty-eyed about Scottish patriotism, or that they are blind to the corrupt and self-serving nature of EU institutions. It’s more that they like sticking it to the sorts of people who hang Union flags in their windows... Flag snobbery is a proxy for a campaign to traduce Britain, to smear it as bigoted and bellicose, to knock down its statues, to divide it into smaller pieces or even – though they mostly accept that this is now a nostalgic fantasy – to dissolve it into a bigger European polity. Yet a world without the UK would be a poorer, meaner place. Who has done more to spread private property, jury trials, parliamentary elections, habeas corpus or personal autonomy? Who has made such a contribution to scientific and medical advance? A world without Britain is a world in which darker and more authoritarian forces – from Bonapartism to Stalinism – would have gone unchecked. A world in which the UK broke apart would be a world in which there was less trade, less prosperity, less innovation – and in which the coalition for freedom was feebler. The flag is a symbol of British liberty, a symbol everyone can adopt, regardless of where their grandparents were born. A country that derides such symbols will struggle to assimilate newcomers: without a shared sense of identity, there is nothing for them to integrate into. Which is why those of us who, until now, have been mildly and diffidently pro-flag, should make a bit more of an effort. We did not want this culture war; but, like it or not, we are in it now."
Council Cracks Down On Free Speech, Forces Employees to Fly LGBTQ Flags - "Melton City Council is cracking down on diversity of thought by forcing all employees to display an endorsement of LGBTQ ideology in their email signatures, regardless of their personal beliefs and religious faith. Over 500 council employees were notified on Friday that the council’s signature template would be updated to include an image of the rainbow flag advocating for LGBTQ issues, along with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags... “I don’t think it’s professional or respectful for government representatives to be adding a rainbow flag to emails when I ask about hall hire rates or zoning issues,” a local said. “They should just treat everybody well and then stick to their jobs.”"
Gallery highlights ‘male gaze’ in Manet masterpiece in ‘woke attempt to call out misogyny’ - "The “male gaze” in a Manet masterpiece has been highlighted by the Courtauld Gallery after curators introduced new labels addressing “misogyny” in art. The London gallery, which holds the UK’s foremost Impressionist collection, reviewed the labelling of all of its paintings as part of a three-year, £57 million refurbishment. Some information panels now address issues like artists’ racism and sexism. Manet's masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, has been reinterpreted with a new label which suggests that the painting has an “unsettling” quality, because of the presence of a man on the canvas."
School board cancels plans to name school after Obama after protests by immigration activists - "Bruce Springsteen might like him. Netflix might like him. But if the Waukegan school district name change controversy is anything to go by, one particular area of Illinois despises former President Obama... It was back at the end of March that the Waukegan, Illinois Board of Education met to deliberate name changes for two middle schools. Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster's connection to slavery is what kicked the initiative off in the first place. Barack and Michelle Obama made it to the list of potential finalists for Thomas Jefferson Middle School. But then former President Obama's record on deportations came up."
I thought if you criticised Obama it meant you were racist
People are accusing York University of years of anti-Black racism against professor - "More than 6,000 people have signed a petition in support of a professor who is facing termination and alleging anti-Black racism at York University. Dr. Aimé Avolonto, who has been a professor of French Studies at York's Glendon College since 2004, is levelling allegations of racism, harassment, and unfair termination against York University and its staff... Following a multi-year external investigation conducted by Roger Beaudry of Aptus Solutions—a process which the petition alleges prioritized testimonies from white interviewees over Black witnesses—York U is now countering Avolonto's claims with some of their own. According to Joy, York University received its first complaint against Avolonto in 2016, followed by additional allegations the following year. "Following a thorough, independent external investigation, multiple reports have concluded that allegations against Professor Avolonto of workplace harassment, including gender-based and sexual harassment, were founded," said Joy. "The University takes its responsibility to maintain a safe workplace seriously and is acting accordingly.""
Presumably if a black man harasses women, the solution is to blame a white man otherwise it'll be racist
Meme - "Quand la fille qui arrete pes da poster "ACAB" appelle les flics quand tu rentres par effraction chez elle"
Adam Zivo: Pride boycott of Halifax library a disturbing attack on free expression - "Halifax Pride boycotted Halifax Public Library over a refusal to pull a book from its shelves. The book — Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier — is considered by many to be transphobic and rife with misinformation. The boycott is part of a disturbing pattern of Canadian pride festivals penalizing library systems for defending freedom of expression. In 2019, Meghan Murphy, a writer frequently accused of transphobia, was invited to speak at a third party event hosted at the Toronto Public Library. In response, Pride Toronto published an open letter melodramatically stating that “there will be consequences to our relationship for this betrayal.” That same year, Vancouver Pride banned its local library system from the parade for allowing Murphy to book space for an event. Whether squelching speakers or banning books, the underlying issue is how we treat freedom of expression in our institutions — because what is book banning but another imposition on a thinker’s right to expression? Pride Festivals, along with many LGBTQ activists, believe that they have the right to police what views are allowed to publicly exist, or what ideas people have access to. As an LGBTQ activist myself, I find this behaviour disappointingly reckless. LGBTQ activists should, by all rights, be enthusiastic supporters of freedom of expression — especially for views considered unpopular and harmful. Why is it that so many activists forget how integral that freedom has been to their own success?... When LGBTQ organizations try to de-platform people and ban books at libraries, they claim the right to reject government definitions of unacceptable hate (which are carefully formulated) and instead define that themselves, unilaterally, without consulting wider society, and without an accessible or accountable discussion on what that new definition should be and why its benefits outweigh its costs. Everyone has the right to define unacceptable hate however they want in their private lives, but when you try to impose that on the government and weaponize state power, that’s a different story and requires wider societal and legal consultation. If you want something deemed too hateful to be public, then properly lobby for that — coercive bans and quasi-mafioso references to “consequences” are unproductive and juvenile. Relatedly, if LGBTQ activists are confident that their opponents are wrong, then they should do the work of persuading people about why that is, allowing individuals to freely judge for themselves. This is a basic duty of activism — the duty to persuade — and Canadian pride festivals have been abdicating that duty. If you are unwilling or unable to engage someone who is outside of your support base, the solution is not to paternalistically limit their access to information. Yet that is what is happening because persuasion is out of vogue, having been displaced by activism that whines about “emotional labour” and dispenses catch-phrases like “it’s not my job to educate you.” Why anyone thinks it’s clever to raise artificial barriers to disseminating knowledge about your rights is beyond me. The result has been a widespread backlash against LGBTQ rights. An infamous 2019 GLAAD study showed Americans, especially younger ones, have become more uncomfortable with LGBTQ people (the study has since been discontinued). As I’ve written about before, it turns out that when you suppress outward articulations of belief, while leaving people unchanged on the inside, you create resentment and discomfort. Who would have thought? When LGBTQ organizations advocate for banning books, they lean into the bull-headedness that has been fuelling the backlash against them, endangering the communities that they represent. Having taken it for granted that whatever progress they’ve won will last in perpetuity, many members of the LGBTQ community also discount the possibility that they might benefit from freedom of expression again in the future. Yet, given the aforementioned backlash against their rights, that’s a risky assumption to make — not necessarily in the near future, but very possibly in the long view. Finally, freedom of expression will surely be essential for other groups that, while currently stigmatized, may eventually earn social acceptance in the future — much as LGBTQ people did over the past few decades. Since evolutions in social and moral norms are unpredictable, this freedom needs to be given widely and neutrally so all groups can equally advocate for themselves (whether that advocacy succeeds is another question). Inviting more limitations on thoughts and words endangers that."
Liberals pretend to be against "book bans", but claim everything they disagree with is "harmful"
Terms such as 'white privilege' may have contributed to 'neglect' of disadvantaged white pupils, report by MPs finds - "The use of terms including "white privilege" may have contributed to the "neglect" of white working-class pupils in the education system, a Commons committee has found. MPs on the Education Select Committee said schools must consider the implication of such "politically controversial terminology" and find "a better way to talk about racial disparities". A report by the committee agreed with the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that the term "white privilege" can be "divisive" and said disadvantaged white pupils have been let down by "muddled" policy thinking. It also accused the Department for Education (DfE) of failing to acknowledge the extent of the problem. Conservative MP and chairman of the Education Select Committee Robert Halfon said white working-class pupils have been "let down and neglected" by the system "for decades"... white people are the ethnic majority in the country, yet FSM-eligible white British pupils are the largest disadvantaged group... "Never again should we lazily put the gap down to poverty alone, given that we know free school meal eligible pupils from other ethnic groups consistently outperform their white British peers.""
Demonising groups has very real consequences
Librarian had no bias cutting biracial girl's hair: district - "A Michigan elementary school librarian accused of a “modern-day scalping” for cutting a biracial girl’s hair will get to keep her job, district officials said, finding that she didn’t act with racial bias."
Anything done to a "minority" must be motivated by bias
Florida students say 9/11 education should avoid placing blame and 'American exceptionalism' - "Students from the University of Florida say education about the 9/11 attacks 'should avoid placing blame' and called for a stop to perpetuating ideas of 'American exceptionalism' in the latest example of woke ideas run amok on college campuses. Ahead of the 20th anniversary, student reporter Ophelie Jacobson surveyed students at the Gainesville campus to ask their opinions about education surrounding the terrorist attacks on September 1, 2001. She noted that students today were too young- or not alive -during the 9/11 attacks to have their own memories of the tragic events. Most students said that they did not remember learning about the 9/11 attacks extensively during their schooling... the Virginia Department of Education was slammed for promoting a teacher training video which instructs teachers to avoid calling the 9/11 killers 'terrorists', and to avoid promoting 'American exceptionalism' during lessons about the attacks. The nearly two-hour long video, which has since been removed, was posted on the VDOE's YouTube channel to promote a 'culturally responsive and inclusive 9/11 commemoration' to guide teachers how to broach the sensitive subject 'in a way that does not cause harm.'... She claimed that asking students to 'stand and condemn 9/11' in a performative way would be 'highly inappropriate.' She also suggested that teachers use the word 'extremists' instead of 'terrorists' to further 'disrupt this false equivalency of Muslims and terrorism.'"
Of course, if you don't call all acts of violence by white men "terrorism" (even if not politically motivated), that is proof of "white supremacy"
'Stuck in a rut': Andrew Potter catalogues our ongoing decline - The Hub - "There’s this line from Bertrand Russell, that I quote in the book, where he says something like, “We’ve gone from a world where our chief opponent is nature to one where our chief opponent is other people. And the richer you get, the less you have to worry about nature, and the more you have to worry about other people.” I think there’s something really profound about that. That is to say, a feature of a lot of our beliefs today is that they no longer need to hook on to the world in a meaningful sense anymore. What matters is how our beliefs situate us with respect to other people, and their identities, politics, and so on. I think that’s the core of a lot of the “woke” versus the alt-right that’s going on right now, which is that you can believe all kinds of crazy things on the left; you have all kinds of crazy views on the right, but what matters is how it positions you with respect to the identity politics and cultural warfare that’s going on right now... I have a line that I stole from Philippe Lagassé, who you might know as a foreign and defence policy professor at Carleton University, where he once tweeted something to the effect that, “What people don’t realize is that we’re as religious as we ever were. Only the gods have changed.”... people on both sides of the political spectrum at the extremes have profoundly magical views about how the world works and about what’s going on, whether it’s the almost crazy approaches in the far-right towards vaccines and 5G computer chips and the deep, abiding conviction that there are effective conspiracies at work in the world; and the left with everything from Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop, to the magical approaches towards language that goes on in the intense policy of language. This is all just religiosity by another means. I also sometimes wonder whether there’s a bit of spiritual homeostasis in the human brain. That is, that as one form of religiosity declines, it simply gets squeezed like a balloon into another part. That we’re never going to secularize; we’re not going to become a civilization of Mr. Spocks. It’s just not going to happen. So, the question is, are those religious values getting pushed into something productive or something unproductive? I say this as someone who was staunchly secular and anti-religious for a long time, I believe that organized religions have had a much more productive and positive influence on society than the increasingly baroque and bespoke forms of religiosity that are at work right now."
"Much of modern politics seems increasingly consumed by distributional questions rather than ones of growth, dynamism, and progress. How can we re-orient our politics away from zero-sum debates, and towards greater ambition and abundance?"
"we have to start believing the growth is a good thing. I think it’s become a bad word, because growth is attributed to and is considered a part of resource exploitation, and resource exploitation is considered bad because of environmental effects, climate change, and so on. It’s a very short hop then from advocating growth to destroying the planet. The pro-growth crowd has done a bad job of showing that it doesn’t have to be the case; that growth and environmental preservation are actually allies... The second aspect of it is growth and innovation. I’m actually quite persuaded by a lot of the arguments in Hall’s book, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past. I think that one of the big lessons that I worry about coming out of the pandemic is whether we have simply strangled our capacities for innovation in layers of bureaucracy, regulations, and forms of risk aversion. I used to laugh when someone like Tony Clement would come on and say, “Oh, we’re going to introduce a red tape bill, where every new regulation has to go along with the elimination of one or two existing regulations,” because it seems like a very simplistic approach. But I’m increasingly sympathetic toward the general view that we stumbled onto a buffet, about 150 years ago, of innovation and productivity, and that we gorged ourselves. But you can’t then tie the kitchen up in regulations and red tape and expect yourself to continue to be fed. So, I think we need to find a way of cutting through a lot of this that’s going on right now"
