Thread by @wanyeburkett on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I remember once being at a bar with a good friend, a good, kind person, and telling her that I had to leave because I was conducting some technical interviews at work the next morning and wanted to be sure I was well rested. She was asking a bit about it, and as I described the process, which by tech standards wasn’t all that rigorous, but which did involve more than one technical round, you could see her face kind of scrunch up. The whole thing clearly sounded elitist and snobby distasteful to her; and after all, “you’re just my buddy who hangs at the bar where we’re all equals, who do you even think you are that you can gatekeep a job in this way?” The feeling was unmistakable, like that feeling you get when you’re on a date and you know you’re not impressing. This is the emotion on a broader scale that is underlying a lot of liberal thinking about immigration. When you start talking about vetting, about standards, about earning potential, even about criminality, their faces start to crunch up like, “who do you think you are, anyway? Who are you to judge other human beings? To put a measure on their worth?” They feel this way about job interviews, about college admissions, about immigration policy. This is why you get into these weird debates where they try to beat you on a technicality with the language of legality. None of that is real, or at least it’s not primary. What’s primary is that feeling they get when you start talking like this. They are extremely emotional about it and the policy follows from the emotion. It’s primary, immediate, reflexive. It’s all in the way their face scrunches up when you mention it. The idea that they’ve arrived at that position because they understand the contours of the debate better than you, because they know the law, because they have looked at all the data, because they’re just simply moron, gosh darn it, couldn’t be more absurd. Their face scrunches up when you start talking aboutstandards in admissions. It’s involuntary, reflexive. Every single piece of data they’ve ever learned about immigration is marshaled in defense of that initial lowering of the eyes and raising of the corners of their mouth. I think the most charitable thing you can say about this is that if you felt that feeling, then you would be equally suspicious of anybody who didn’t. It would feel to you internally like an expression of basic kindness and openness to humanity and an absence of it would present as a form of casual sociopathy. It would take a unique kind of person who was both pretty smart and very good at decoupling their own immediate emotional reactions from policy to feel as they do and not draw that conclusion about the other side. So of course almost none of them are able to avoid it. My view, of course, is that some amount of this feeling is innate. Some of that innateness is genetic, some of it random. You can be more or less predisposed toward this feeling; and then there is the culture, your friends, what is valued by the institutions you inhabit, what you’re taught in school, what is valued by the society. I think this latter portion is fairly large. We know that people don’t always feel this way in every setting and the people within our own country don’t feel this way in equal measure everywhere. Some of that is down to selection effects, sure, but I think culture plays a big part."
Left wingers really think everyone is equally talented, so disparate outcomes must be due to discrimination or oppression
Meme - Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil: "Lots of people are saying this is frivolous because firefighters should have to pass some test, but let's go ahead and look at some test questions so you can see why this test is just way too hard. This first one's a doozy:"
"A firefighter determines that 350 feet of hose is needed to reach a particular building. If the hoses are 60 feet in length, what is the minimum number of lengths of hose needed?
A. 3
B. 4
C. 5
D. 6"
DOJ Civil Rights Division @CivilRights: "Justice Department Secures Agreement with Durham, North Carolina, to End Discriminatory Hiring Practices in City’s Fire Department"
You're no longer allowed to discriminate against the lazy and the stupid
DOJ Tells Four Police, Fire Departments That It’s Racist To Expect Employees To Know Basic Math - "The Biden-Harris Department of Justice has undertaken a slew of lawsuits against local police and fire departments alleging that it is racist to require hires entrusted with public safety to know basic math. The lawsuits undermine Kamala Harris’s attempts to brand herself as a moderate... employing the theory of “disparate impact,” the radical theory that holds that anytime there are statistical racial disparities, racism must be the cause — even if no one can explain how... Most blacks generally pass the tests, and the lawsuits do not explain how the tests can be racist against only some blacks. Blacks who passed the tests are excluded from the financial payouts... While the DOJ said the tests were not relevant to actually being a good firefighter, an online practice test suggests that it is directly relevant, that people could die if such firefighters were hired. One question asks if a building is 350 feet away, how many 60-foot hoses would be needed... the DOJ forced Maryland State Police to pay $2.75 million to women who were barred from being officers because they couldn’t pass physical fitness exams testing, for example the ability to run quickly, and blacks who couldn’t pass a written test. The test that the DOJ says is racist is designed to ensure that cops are at least as smart as an elementary school student and can serve residents by, for example, adding up the total value of stolen property when items were stolen valued at $400, $40, $1,500, and $100. When police officers who don’t meet basic standards are hired, they sometimes abuse members of the public, sometimes resulting in still more accusations of racism if those members of the public are black. Last year, the media pointed to Memphis police allegedly repeatedly beating people as an example of police brutality — but it turned out that the police were all black and were hired despite not meeting the usual standards required for the position. After D.C. Mayor Marion Barry made firehouses in the nation’s capital a racial spoils program, firefighters repeatedly turned out to be gun-toting, violent criminals. Public outrage over the hiring program culminated in 2014 after a 77-year old man had a heart attack directly in front of a fire station and begged for help, but none of the firefighters ran to his aid. His family sued for $7 million."
TheBlaze on X - "Female, black applicants who failed Maryland State Police tests likely to receive $2.75M in backpay from discrimination suit"
Frank DeScushin on X - "The US government sued Maryland's State Police because the physical test to become a trooper saw women fail at a higher rate than men, and the written test saw Blacks fail at a higher rate than Whites. If Title VII of the Civil Rights Act requires proportionate pass rates, then nearly all qualification tests are illegal, and Title VII necessarily lowers profession standards. Title VII is based on the idea that all groups are the same and will thus pass tests at the same rate, but the tests themselves consistently show this isn't so. Similar happened several years back when the USDOJ sued New York City’s Fire Department because Black and Hispanic candidates failed the written test at a higher rate than Whites. Those non-white candidates who failed were awarded $98 million dollars between them."
Crémieux on X - "Lots of people attacking this decision, but do you think YOU could pass the POST? Here's a thread of test questions. Question 1:"
Geoffrey Miller on X - "Pop quiz: Explain how the Supreme Court decision in Griggs v Duke Power Co (1971) explains most of what wrong with American meritocracy, academia, & college tuition costs in the last 50 years."
i/o on X - "If an employer isn't legally permitted to use the most reliable measure of mental ability that exists (IQ tests) when hiring employees for cognitively-demanding positions, it will be limited to less reliable proxy indicators of intelligence like the quality of colleges attended and GPA. This encourages credentialism and boosts the value of a college degree, thereby increasing the demand for undergraduate and graduate-level education, which gives colleges an opportunity to raise tuition costs faster than the overall inflation rate. The extra dollars brought in with increased tuition get increasingly pushed into peripheral administrative activities (like DEI) unrelated to the essential function of a university, and into boutique and heavily-ideological areas of studies."
Crémieux on X - "In 1939, a class of NYPD officers was selected based on Civil Service Exam scores. At that point, it was the department's most Jewish class ever (a third was Jewish!) and it had a lot more women than previous classes too. It produced unusually capable officers."
Jonatan Pallesen on X - "Blacks score about a standard deviation lower in tests on average. This is simply a fact. We can see this on the medical exams, going as far back as we have data:
Recently, we could see on the Fireman test that the difference was about 1 SD on average. It's also true for the SATs, and has been historically. Or any other test that estimates aspects of problem-solving. Singling out one test (such as the police exam) and saying that the difference in test scores on that specific test is due to discrimination, when this difference is present on all tests, makes no sense."
The woke cope is that all tests are discriminatory
Daniel Friedman on X - "The way to break the universities hold is to overturn Griggs v. Duke Power, the case that held that employers may not subject job applicants to tests that have a disparate racial impact. By banning tests, this decision made degrees a proxy for intelligence."
i/o on X - "The cognitive disadvantage of blacks (which is scientifically not in dispute) is turning out to be a gold mine for some of them. This is the fourth case in the last few years that I'm aware of in which blacks have used their lousy performance on a test of mental ability to sue for racial discrimination. The American Psychological Association says there's a 15-point mean IQ gap between whites and blacks. No reputable intelligence scientist disputes the existence of the gap. The society we live in is corrupted by sentimental and scientifically unsupported notions of equal group abilities. This is the most recent example of where this is leading us."
Meme - Jeremy Kauffman @jeremykauffman: "3 out of 10 black applicants for police jobs in Maryland were unable to pass a standardized test. Because almost all whites passed, black applicants sued and won a $2.75m settlement. 25 failing blacks will also be hired for police jobs. This is the math section of the test:"
Adventures of the Land North @4guys_dryrubgym: "How is this a serious test? This has to be a joke. This is literally 2nd grade math"
Ironically, a lot of the people who are against this test also mock the police for not wanting to hire people who are too smart
Meme - "Peter Dinklage after complaining about the Snow White remake using dwarves only for them to become CGI and take 7 jobs away from dwarf actors"
"I miscalculated."
Meme - "this is gross objectification"
"It's for Incels"
"actually its fun"
"let us enjoy it too incel"
"actually this is for the girlies"
*We are here*
"This always belonged to us, you are the invaders"
Meme - "WHAT DO WE WANT?!"
"FREE SPEECH & EQUALITY!!"
"FOR EVERYONE?!"
"NO, JUST FOR US!!"
"THAT'S NOT FREE SPEECH & EQUALITY!!"
"YOU'RE RACIST!!"
Meme - Wesley Yang @wesyang: "If you deceive enough people about what the law says, you have effectively changed the law for the vast majority of situations that never reach a court"
Razib 🥥 Khan 🧬 📘✍️📱 @razibkhan: "most ppl are retarded, not just tim walz"
""The United States Constitution has laws against hate speech" % saying "True" by Sex and Generation"
Gen Z are better informed than MIllennials and Gen X, but Boomers are the best informed. And men are more informed than women. Ironic, given the relentless mocking of men and "boomers"
Thread by @L0m3z on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Researching some stuff on the Great Awokening and decided to revisit the Charlie Hebdo murders and various responses to it. This open letter to PEN written by Teju Cole and co-signed by hundreds of other mainstream writers like Joyce Carol Oates is as striking now as it was when I read it 10 years ago. This was an early indication for me that something was very very wrong in the world of American intellectual life and that we were headed down a dark path. The context here is hat PEN awarded Charlie Hebdo with a "Courage" award in the aftermath of the murders. Hardly a provocation from a Free Speech organization. But the signatories of this letter didn't like that. Sure, the Hebdo cartoonists were brutally slaughtered for drawing a picture, but, well they were ... racists! This really is a perfect encapsulation of the who/whom logic that would become the engine of the Great Awokening. Other thing about Charlie Hebdo, it was the first time I saw the NPC update happen in real time... Right thinking people were initially appalled and supported CH unconditionally. But over the days and weeks that followed, they changed their views to align with the letter above I observed this with personal acquaintances. Smart libs inside of academia. Their instincts were right. This wasn't complicated or nuanced at all. But very quickly they lost the courage to say so directly. Suddenly this was a moral gray area. It really was shocking to see."
Left wing/woke preference falsification and virtue signalling in action
Meme - Pirat_Nation @Pirat_Nation: "A modder "whitewashed" Angrboda from God of War Ragnarok, but the files did not last even an hour on NexusMods and were removed by moderators Source: https://reddit.com/r/Games_Piracy"
The modder "whitewashed" the dark-skinned Angrboda from God of War Ragnarok, but the files did not last even an hour on NexusMods : r/Games_Piracy - "On September 19, the long-awaited release of the PC version of the game God of War Ragnarok took place and many fans of the Kratos universe were waiting in anticipation for the correction of some inaccuracies of the developers that could not be corrected on console platforms, to which already in 2022 there were complaints from players during the release of the project on PlayStation . Just a few days later, an enthusiast named Comic Fan shared concepts and unfinished files for the dark-skinned heroine of God of War Ragnarok with white skin, to bring her closer to the description from Norse mythology. But just an hour later, the alternative version of Angbroda was deleted by NexusMods moderators without explanation. The author himself did not despair and decided to post his vision of the heroine on another resource called Gamebanana, but in the end his work suffered the same fate, and the moderators of the portal called the work of the 3D modeler “discrimination” and “trolling.”"
You're only allowed to raceswap in one direction. This is what preventing "harm" amounts to
Only fascists believe in faithfulness to the source material
Meme - ""I can't believe I have monkeypox. How did this happen?"
The entire month of June: South Park: *huge clusterfuck*"
Meme - Buck Sexton @BuckSexton: "Really all the Soviets needed to do was convince Americans that criticizing communism was "hate speech" and they could have won the Cold War"
I hate hate speech laws | The Spectator - "For far more than any race, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference or nationality against which I might harbour some irrational prejudice, what I hate is hate speech laws. Hatred is an emotion. It is not the business of the state to legislate how we feel or to make us into nice people by fiat. True freedom of expression entails the right to say things that others find disagreeable. I may believe fervently in the existence of Israel, but I believe just as fervently in the right of anyone else to say that they don’t believe in it or even that the country is racist. Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are preposterous – hyperbolic, rhetorically impoverished and historically illiterate. But we should never stop the trite, the poorly educated and the feeble-minded from embarrassing themselves. By advertising their deficiencies, they do the rest of us a service. Deeming a statement hateful is a supremely subjective exercise. Britain characterises as a hate crime anything the ostensible victim claims is a hate crime, which is legally absurd, relying as it does on no objective, statutorily specific standard. This eye-of-the-beholder definition is a formula for the pursuit of frivolous litigation and petty personal vendetta. Hate speech laws are naturally expansive and grow only more prohibitive. Scotland has criminalised speech in your own home. Pending legislation in Canada would criminalise what you might say. In flagrant defiance of the bedrock democratic principle of equality under the law, the UK’s list of ‘protected characteristics’ grows ever longer. The population sheltered under the Equality Act’s clumsy umbrella could soon extend to all Britons who aren’t straight white men. Even the holding of certain opinions, such as belief in the reality of biological sex, is now ‘protected’. The answer isn’t to protect still more opinions, but to protect all opinions, including nasty or wrongheaded ones, and scrap the Act. These laws easily slippery-slope to criminalising ideas. If you criticise the Islamic faith as predatory and intolerant, isn’t that anti-Muslim? It’s a commonplace for the media to conflate being anti-immigration with being anti-immigrant. By now, we’re all exhausted by the never-ending debate over whether being anti-Zionism or anti-Israel is unavoidably anti-Semitic. We can keep arguing, but it shouldn’t be up to the state to settle that dispute. In outlawing crude statements of bigotry such as ‘I hate black people’ (curiously, you might get away with ‘I hate white people’), hate speech laws also imperil assertions with more nuance. How about, ‘The animosity and hypersensitivity of the BLM era has made me racist’ – which I’ve heard from more than one party. Should saying that be illegal? In Britain, the prosecution of utterances, posters and tweets has distracted the police from pursuing actual criminals. But the blank page is the ultimate safe space. Words aren’t violence, any more than silence is. The US does sensibly disallow incitement to violence, which would apply to multiple anti-Israel protestors who’ve called for killing Jews. Short of that, expressions of bilious or vitriolic ideas can act as a safety valve. Better ugly speech than ugly acts. I can’t think of a country that’s ever plunged into tyranny because it gave its citizens excessive latitude to say what they think, including the right to say mean things. Demagoguery and totalitarianism thrive on restriction and suppression of dissent. The most horrible places to live are those where you keep your mouth shut, you watch your back even in private and you live in terror of letting slip some stray remark that will destroy your livelihood and your reputation, perhaps even landing you in jail. Which sounds like just the sort of place that pending legislation in Ireland and Canada aims to manifest. It sounds like Scotland right now."
Meme - "SECRET INGREDIENT/ FOXFORD COMICS 2024"
*Soyjak gets 3 tacos made by a white person and is upset*
*Soyjak gets 3 identical tacos in an identical setting, but made by a brown person, and is excited*
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Robin D'Angelo, Saira Rao and all of these similar people were obvious grifting morons all along. D'Angelo, specifically, just deleted her socials after her $15,000/hr fee was exposed. I would genuinely love to see her - indeed, her whole field's - reaction to an IQ test score. There is no/almost no "American systemic racism" in 2024. The most successful Yanks are Asian, Indian, Nigerian, and Jewish. What we have been doing is paying very stupid people to scare us with outlines of old ghosts."
On "Am I Racist?"
Meme - Parkrose Community United Church of Christ: "Project 2025 should be called Project 666"
Left wingers usually get very upset when churches get involved in politics. Turn out that's only when they're not pushing the left wing agenda
Labour MP Dawn Butler shares video with ‘celebratory collage’ of murderers and rapists - "In spoken verse, she refers to an unnamed foe as being “the wrong one, the violent one, the weird one,” before saying that she is “the Chosen One, Because I am of the First Ones.” In the Spectator magazine, Melanie McDonagh said: “What I think she is saying is that because human civilisation originated in Africa and her own ethnic origins are African … she is a cut above the rest of us.” The footage attracted widespread criticism on X, with critics describing it as racist and offensive. GB News can now reveal that the post also included stills of controversial black American activists and criminals. The video includes portraits of cop-killing fugitive Assata Shakur and controversial Nation of Islam figure Khalid Abdul Muhammad. Shakur is one of the FBI’s so-called "Most Wanted Terrorists" after she escaped custody in 1979 following a conviction for murdering a police officer. Muhammad gave a speech in 1993 in which he referred to Jews as the “bloodsuckers” of blacks and called the Pope a “no-good cracker”. He also called for all white South Africans to be murdered after a 24-hour warning period. The clip also includes a still of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Several leaders of the Black Panther movement also feature in the footage, named below, while “my skin is my protection” is shown across the screen as Butler continues her spoken verse. The footage also appears to glorify Eldridge Cleaver, a convicted serial rapist, who considered raping white women an “insurrectionary act”. In his 1968 book Soul on Ice, a collection of essays written while imprisoned, he said: “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women - and this point, I believe was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman.” He continued: “I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.”... Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, director of anti-racist campaign group Don’t Divide Us, said the footage was “offensive rubbish” and questioned the Government’s silence on the matter. “Her ‘celebratory collage’ includes American activists who have been convicted of murder, rape, and openly espoused antisemitism. “This is an elected British MP uncritically and publicly endorsing criminals and racial thinking. The American civil rights movement deserved better, and so do we.” She added: “Butler is saying black people are superior to white people. “It is good that she has exposed her racism for us to see. The Government’s silence on this speaks volumes about its cynical use of racism/anti-racism to police the words of many while giving free reign to the likes of Butler. “If Black History Month gives a green light to this offensive rubbish, it's high time for it to go.”" Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert, director of anti-racist campaign group Don’t Divide Us, said the footage was “offensive rubbish” and questioned the Government’s silence on the matter. “Her ‘celebratory collage’ includes American activists who have been convicted of murder, rape, and openly espoused antisemitism. “This is an elected British MP uncritically and publicly endorsing criminals and racial thinking. The American civil rights movement deserved better, and so do we.” She added: “Butler is saying black people are superior to white people. “It is good that she has exposed her racism for us to see. The Government’s silence on this speaks volumes about its cynical use of racism/anti-racism to police the words of many while giving free reign to the likes of Butler. “If Black History Month gives a green light to this offensive rubbish, it's high time for it to go.”
Harrison Pitt on X - "One minute: “I’m just as British as you, racists!”
The next: “You ghastly Brits will pay for what you’ve done to my beautiful, mahogany-skinned people. How dare you blaspheme against the sanctity of God’s chosen global majority!”"
GB News on X - "'There's no apology whatsoever and there is silence from the Labour Party.' @CDP1882 calls out the Labour Party for their 'silence' over Dawn Butler MP posting a black history month video featuring murderers and rapists, which has now been deleted."
Meme - Jack Hadfield 🇬🇧 @JackHadders: "It’s incredibly radicalising to see a sitting MP for the governing party posting retarded hotep-tier nonsense on her social media. Who’s put this together for her? Do they have access to Parliament? A sensible country would have them monitored for extremism"
"YOU SEE THIS SKIN I'M IN? I AM THE CHOSEN ONE"
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani: How can Iran still legally stone women to death? - "I watched this sickening film yesterday morning. Posted on the internet by a human rights group, it shows the execution in Tehran of two Iranians convicted of adultery."
If you condemn this, you're racist, ethnocentric, xenophobic and Islamophobic
Meme - Harry Robinson @HarryLotusEater: "Ahh yes, because Emily Brontë, who lived and died in a Yorkshire valley, clearly meant Sub-Saharan when she wrote that Heathcliff was ‘dark’."
"Wuthering Heights adaptation stirs controversy after white actor is chosen to play Heathcliff. Emily Brontë fans criticise casting of Jacob Elordi to play ‘dark-skinned’ character in film starring Margot Robbie"
Thread by @lara_e_brown on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The claim Heathcliff was "one of the most famous people of colour in literature" is a fundamentally absurd misreading of Wuthering Heights. It emerges from a misunderstanding of the Victorian use of the descriptor "dark" 🧵thread on what Brontë (and other writers) meant.
To start with - it's pretty clear that Linton Heathcliff is probably not a "person of colour". He is described in Ch. 19 as a "pale, delicate, effeminate boy". Earlier, in ch. 3 Brontë claims his face is "as white as the wall behind him". So why does this claim keep popping up? Heathcliffe is described as a "dark-skinned gipsy in aspect" (aspect here almost certainly referencing his appearance - not a known fact about his origins, which are a mystery over the course of the novel). Mr Linton also hypothesises Heathcliff might be "a little Lascar, or American or Spanish castaway". This is a derision of his character - based on Heathcliff's apparent back story as a foundling adopted from the streets of Liverpool. Describing a character as "dark skinned" is a clear Victorian shorthand for the Byronic Hero. Heathcliff is a typical Byronic Hero (as first exemplified in 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'). He is at arms length from polite society, wild, and unsettling. Descriptions of Heathcliff as a "gipsy" also centre around status - another way to denigrate a character as an outcast. George Elliot's Maggie Tulliver is described repeatedly as "like a gipsy". This is not a comment on her race - but her wild instincts and lower status. It is feasible that Heathcliff's mother may have been a gipsy (we don't know who she is!) - but here it's worth noting that Victorian traveller communities were usually English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish (or possibly descended from Romanies in Europe).
It's also worth noting that if Heathcliff was discernibly Irish - then Emily Brontë may not have regarded his as "white". Victorian attitudes on this question are worlds apart from modern conceptions. Heathcliff probably simply had recognisably Mediterranean features. Probably most importantly - claims that Heathcliff was a "person of colour" forget how stratified Victorian society was. Heathcliff marries Isabella Linton -a woman from a wealth and respectable society -18th c. Yorkshire was not a place that would have allowed such a union. This isn't to say that Heathcliff being mixed race isn't something one couldn't read into the text, or that films shouldn't cast ethnic minority actors to play him. But it's fundamentally untrue to say he's definitely canonically "not white" without evidence in the text."