Peter MacKinnon: UBC's equity-centred strategic plan for arts an attack on academic freedom - "the University of British Columbia’s dean of arts was “thrilled” to present an interim report addressing the needs of her faculty’s future. It envisions an equity-centred plan and emphasizes themes including reconciliation and decolonization, justice, equity and inclusion. It denounces current evaluations of merit as outdated and ableist, foresees merit in alignment with decolonizing efforts, and urges that inclusion and equity practices must be integral to merit, promotion and tenure decisions. This is a political agenda, not an academic one. If implemented it would entrench a vision from which departure would not be tolerated; indeed assessment, merit, promotion and tenure would depend upon adherence to it. The agenda is incompatible with academic freedom... A pluralist society features many differences about what good public policy entails, and universities should accommodate debate on them without committing their names to a side or sides in the debate. It is worth emphasizing and re-emphasizing that universities are about teaching and research and the institutional policies and supports that allow them to flourish. Among them are institutional independence and neutrality, which enable them to transcend differences in order to maintain wide and nonpartisan public support. Our universities have fallen short here — sometimes issuing statements on issues of the day, sometimes siding, or appearing to side, with anti-Israeli protesters, and occasionally committing themselves on social justice issues. Into this mix comes the leadership of UBC’s arts faculty with the political agenda described here. Arts faculty members should say no to the plan, or the university’s senior administration should do so."
Antiracism: vague politics about an nearly indescribable thing - "The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation. This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that reached its crescendo in the South as the “civil rights movement” wasn’t a movement against a generic “racism;” it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly racial subordination in the South. The 1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed against specific targets, like employment discrimination in defense production. Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and specific programs of redistribution. Whether or not one considers those goals correct or appropriate, they were clear and strategic in a way that “antiracism” simply is not... Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance.”... All too often, “racism” is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity or is characterized as an autonomous “force.” In this kind of formulation, “racism,” a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a material entity. Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldn’t be given independent life. I can appreciate such formulations as transient political rhetoric; hyperbolic claims made in order to draw attention and galvanize opinion against some particular injustice. But as the basis for social interpretation, and particularly interpretation directed toward strategic political action, they are useless. Their principal function is to feel good and tastily righteous in the mouths of those who propound them. People do things that reproduce patterns of racialized inequality, sometimes with self-consciously bigoted motives, sometimes not. Properly speaking, however, “racism” itself doesn’t do anything more than the Easter Bunny does. Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a “class-first” line) and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and whoever is not the latter must be the former. Thus the logic of straining to assign guilt by association substitutes for argument.
From 2009
hoe_math on X - "Leftoids will look you straight in the eye and say some shit like: "All the things you like are wrong because society brainwashed you. You should let ME brainwash you instead. Here's my degree in Gay Crying.""
Meme - "The Fantasy Racism In Baldur's Gate 3 Affected Me More Than I Thought It Would"
*laughs in 40k*
Meme - Smash JT: "PC mods working overtime to save gaming
*Mid woman* *Attractive woman*
*Gay couple* *Straight couple*
*Black woman with zipped up sweater* *White woman exposing cleavage with unzipped sweater*"
Meme - mbuya nehanda’s risen bones ⚱️ @sucolorfavorito: "i did a workshop last week w/ a group of yt queer organizers and i told them that their so called « activist fatigue » is b/c they don’t have an embodied liberation practice they can draw from since they spend more time appropriating the knowledge systems of non-yt people instead"
i/o @eyeslasho: "This "she/her embodied afro-feminist" is getting "exhausted" by all the "yt" activists who refuse to "transformatively" purge their violent whiteness ("terror" and "theft" and "barbarism") and accept their subordinate role in the liberation struggles of the "non-yt" oppressed. "I reminded them as we finished the workshop with my latinx indigena partner in praxis..." I promise you that this is a real quote."
Ron Stauffer @ronstauffer: "Me: impossible. That is 100% fake.
She/Her:"
mbuya nehanda's risen bones: "To survive. This is where I draw the line. I reminded them as we finished the workshop with my latinx indigena partner in praxis that we are ancestors in training more than 500 years of collaborative efforts & praxis between our African & indigenous communities."
malmesburyman on X - "In 2020 my white wife was intensely pressured by her white friends to be woke, not vote Trump. A white girl she knew from high school and hadn’t seen in years even sent her menacing DMs for “being silent” about Floyd on insta. White women went nuts for woke, and men won’t forget."
Fact Checker Eric on X - "Dems: "omg maga men pressure their wives to vote the way they want."
Dems: "I'd absolutely divorce you if you vote for the person I don't like.""
Jakethecrazy🦬 on X - "Every argument boils down to “it’s ok when we do it.”"
Fact Checker Eric on X - "Yes. Every contradiction comes down to them arguing that their analysis of the situation must be accepted and people aren't allowed to have their own analysis."
Glenn Greenwald on X - "A @Slate writer is confounded that JD Vance's wife, Usha, doesn't divorce him. She cannot comprehend how a non-white woman could stay with a conservative. Her ultimate answer: she's just obedient to her husband and identifies with her white oppressor."
Sarah Haider 👾 on X - "Widely shared view on the left, sadly. Beyond the toxic approach to relationships, it actively encourages political division. Having people you love disagree with you is a powerful moderating force for both parties.
I’m lucky that I have many family members who 1) disagree with me 2) wouldn’t abandon me. I wish I could say the same about friends, but I also understand that leftists are under immense social pressure to cut off non-leftists, and it’s quite hard to stand up against that."
Melissa Chen on X - "I have so much contempt for the way some liberal women view racial minorities and the institutions of marriage & family. This piece in Slate about Usha Vance (JD Vance’s wife) is a remarkable window into this mindset. They despise marriage as a pillar that upholds white heterosexual supremacy. They view minority women as tokenized pawns, and they are completely entitled to our “allegiance.” And because Usha Vance doesn’t contradict her husband’s politics, they must write long think pieces analyzing why. Never do they consider that our cultures - east and south Asian - might be more conservative than theirs; never do they consider that we can arrive to our own political conclusions, that we have agency and autonomy. And even in the off-chance where we disagreed ideologically, they can’t seem to fathom that we would never think of prioritizing politics over our husbands and family."
Alison Somin on X - "Conflicted about which part of Usha Vance Slate article is more objectively insane:
A) that people should feel allegiance to their race or sex over their spouses;
B) that South Asians benefit from race preferences in admissions in Georgetown"
Meme - Erica Ifill @wickdchiq: "White men really fucked up this world"
Eddie Bacon @EddieBacon9: ""white men really fucked up this world..."
She wrote.....
- In English, the language of the white man
- on a computer invented by white men
- on the Internet, invented by white men
- with energy developed by white men living in a country civilized by white men.
- The freedom, the laws, the culture, without which she is nothing, were created by white men.
The hair straightener that she uses every day to approximate the white ideal of beauty, on the other hand, was invented by a black person"
Jake 🇺🇸 on X - "Harvard prof finds that using "Latinx" causes Hispanics to shift their votes to Trump. Concludes that "gender-inclusive language" is nonetheless important and recommends "political education" in order to get Hispanics to support superfluous neologisms. Nothing wrong with academia at all!"
Thread by @mfrmarcel on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Why are Latinos voting for Trump? @asdurso and I explain part of the puzzle in a new working paper. We show Latinos have backlashed against Democratic politicians due to their usage of, and association with, the gender-inclusive group label "Latinx". "Latinx," a gender-inclusive phrase used to explicitly include gender minorities and broader LGBTQ+ community segments, has become increasingly salient over time: more internet search interest, academic/media usage, and, importantly, usage by Democratic Party politicians. We develop an Identity-Expansion-Backlash Theory and predict, the use of inclusive group labels may have limited electoral benefit while alienating group members predisposed against the inclusivity of the marginalized intra-group subset. We find evidence supporting the theory. Using several cross-sectional and panel datasets, we show opposition to “Latinx” is negatively associated with support for Democratic Party politicians. These associations are driven by conservative and anti-LGBTQ+ Latinos. Moreover, we use a large sample of Latinos surveyed after the 2020 election to show that Latinos living in areas where “Latinx” was more salient pre-election are more likely to switch their vote to Trump between 2016-2020. This association is driven by anti-gay Latinos. Finally, we use toplines and a pre-registered survey experiment to provide causal evidence that politicians who use "Latinx" (instead of "Latino") to refer to Latinos garner less support from segments of the Latino community who are predisposed against LGBTQ+ people. Amanda and I think we should still be using gender-inclusive language. The problem for Democrats is that segments of the Latino community that are queerphobic and would otherwise support them are less likely to do so if queerness is made salient through inclusive language. Ultimately, the solution to the problem we’ve diagnosed requires thinking beyond electoral politics, e.g. political education meant to root out queerphobia in Latino communities, a very difficult solution for social scientists to develop, evaluate, and put into practice."
Jesse Singal on X - "I don't mean this in a snarky way, but it's very interesting to me that a researcher can write a paper on a politically sensitive subject that comes to an 'inconvenient' conclusion, and then turn around and make a sweeping claim about a very large community with no evidence!"
I like how the prescription is mass social engineering
JohnMazing on X - "Remember when they used to claim they just want to be left alone to live their lives?"
Eric S. Raymond on X - "Yeah, I remember. I miss those days. I was a gay-rights supporter, back when the pitch was "we just want to be left alone to live our lives". For some of them, that was the truth. I have gay friends who are pretty normal, if one discounts what they like to do with their genitals. I value them. Unfortunately, normalizing homosexuality also enabled a lot of disgusting, perverted freaks who prey on children. I hate it that social conservatives turned out to be right about this."
Eric S. Raymond on X - "It turns out that "pervert" is a meaningful category, not just a prude hate-word. This is one of the more disturbing things I've learned in this century. All sexual-targeting disorders are comorbid; having any one of them significantly increases the probability that you will also have others. It is likely, though not yet established, that all sexual-targeting disorders are minor variations on a single minimal-brain-damage syndrome affecting the specific portion of the limbic system that does arousal and desire. The statistical correlations certainly seem to suggest this. This is one of the things that libertarian me was extremely annoyed to discover social conservatives had been right about all along. The reasons for their beliefs were usually insane (as in, anyone who uses the word "God" in this context is insane) but the beliefs themselves were predictively sound. Yes, if we let homosexuals fly their freak flag freely, a significant percentage of them *will* in fact come after your children. And they'll scream "bigot" if you try to stop them. I was happier when I didn't know this."
Meme - Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1: "It's now considered "racism" to say that stopping theft is a bad thing...and the post claiming as much gets tens of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes You can't have a country when most of the population thinks laws exist only to be broken, and are supported in that delusion by a major political party What you have then is South Africa, which is hell on earth for normal people The South Africanization of America is plodding on"
Dene @DeneCymone: "White people really think God left them in charge omg"
non aesthet: "Man confronting shoplifters as they try to leave in Downey, California"
Meme - Wanjiru Njoya @WanjiruNjoya: "No one ever says black men are overrepresented in black countries or Indian men are overrepresented in Indian countries, etc It's always "white men are overrepresented in white countries". Where does the Christian Post want white men to go?"
Frank DeScushin @FrankDeScushin: "White men are recognizing the end goal of the crusade against white males is to wrest from them the societies white men built. They know they must pushback on that crusade now before it’s too late. To stifle that pushback, we get articles like this."
The Christian Post: "The strange emergence of the woke right. First, they, too, believe that modern American culture is constituted by a hierarchy of power. But straight white (Christian) men are not at the to this hierarchy. Rather, they are at the bottom As a result, some on the woke right openly call for white racial solidarity on behalf of white identity politics. This may seem strange given that white men are disproportionately overrepresented within the government, the corporate world, and academia and hold far more wealth than their non-white, female counterparts. Yet their belief makes sense given how they view power."
I've seen left wingers hate on the Christian Post. When you hate Christians so much you don't realise they can support your ideology...
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "America was built on the vision and ingenuity of its mostly-European settlers. It wasn't built on the unpaid labor of cotton and tobacco pickers or the retreats and defeats of primitive tribal groups. The only crime is that this obvious truth isn't supposed to be spoken."
🕊️historienne gauchère🌺 #FreeKashmir🍁 #OneKorea on X - "The United States was built on the dual genocides of Indigenous peoples & African slaves brought to the U.S. in chains. 🥀"
🕊️historienne gauchère🌺 #FreeKashmir🍁 #OneKorea on X - "The United States was built on the dual genocides of Indigenous peoples & African slaves brought to the U.S. in chains. 🥀"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Slavery produced about 6-9% of US GDP, by any standard measure, until it's end in 1865."
Strategist says Greens losing older millennial voters as MP vows to listen after Queensland election result : r/australian
Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather says party will have an 'honest look' at its policies after Queensland election - "the party has faced criticism that its state-level decline has been caused by the stance of federal MPs — particularly Mr Chandler-Mather — on issues such as housing, the conflict in the Middle East and support for the militant construction union CFMEU... Kos Samaras, Redbridge Group pollster, said the collapse of the Greens vote had also happened in the New South Wales local government election and recently in the ACT state election. "What we're seeing, not just in Queensland, but across the country is this phenomenon which is they have an in-out problem," he said. "They're losing voters amongst older millennials and they seem to have deliberately embarked on a national strategy of trying to appeal to younger voters between 18 and 34 years old. "That strategy is predicated on being a lot more radical in policy areas like foreign affairs and coming across as really, really aggressive towards the Labor party, and that kind of disenfranchises older progressives."... John Mickel, QUT adjunct associate professor and former Queensland Labor speaker, said the party has created a gap in its support base by moving away from traditional environmental policies... "These are people who will accept them on the environment but will not accept them on their extremism in relation to the Middle East, CFMEU and quite frankly some of the absurdities with their platform. "They were saying no new coal and gas projects on one page, but on the next page promising to open up a state-owned mine [for critical minerals]. "Under any yard stick, in this election, they have failed and failed dismally.""
Even young people don't support the whole left wing agenda
Thread by @JohnDSailer on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, among other things, the use of whiteboards perpetuate whiteness in physics. Here's what's crazy: this "research" was funded by the federal government. 🧵
But first: what's Critical Whiteness Studies? Per the article, it's a research framework that starts with the assumption that omnipresent, invisible whiteness pervades our ordinary interactions and institutions to ensure "white dominance." It's a bold starting point—with more than a hint of racial animosity. Applied to physics, it gets weird. The article finds that the values of "abstractness" and "disembodiment" in physics ("physics values") reify whiteness and reflect human domination and entitlement. It goes on to declare that, yes, even whiteboards "play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization." They do this by "collaborat[ing] with white organizational culture" where ideas gain value "when written down." Again, this is funded by, well, you...
Look at the National Science Foundation's recent budget requests: The federal agency has spent a quarter-billion-dollars annually on it's "Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM." That doesn't account for projects on race and equity funded by other division. Thus, "Observing whiteness in introductory physics" was funded by the National Science Foundation. It was a part of a half million dollar project unpacking which "strategies, tools, and materials" contribute to marginalization. This sort of research is the most noticeable consequence of the NSF's now-well-documented push to fund social justice projects. But, in my latest, I argue that it's not by any means the most consequential, and it's why I'm not at all convinced that "wokeness" has peaked."
Protestia on X - ""Shame on you and your daddy and your granddaddy and your great granddaddy and all the black women they raped." Pastor Charlie Dates blasts evangelicals for trying to tell them they should be voting for the GOP"
Wokal Distance on X - "What the left calls "Social Justice" largely proceeds through emotional appeals based on tribalism and blood guilt fueled by baseless accusations. It's evil."
Cardi B on X - "I’m not a puppet Elon.. I’m a daughter of two immigrant parents that had to work their ass off to provide for me! I’m a product of welfare, I’m a product of section 8, I’m a product of poverty and I’m a product of what happens when the system is set up against you….But you don’t know not one thing about the American struggle…. PS fix my algorithm"
Kiwi Bear on X - "Immigrant parents. Given food, money, housing from citizens. Allowed to become rich and famous "System was set up against me""
gal debored on X - "I love the phrase “doing the work.” What is “the work?” Reading a book? Putting up a yard sign? Seeing a therapist? And how did “doing the work” become doing politics? And what are you working toward? Absolution? Good luck. Also: not politics."
Tyler Austin Harper on X - "We are in the middle of a resurgent New Age movement, and the do-the-work sloganeering and related anti-racist soul-searching are repackaged ideas from the 60s and 70s. My view is that the best way to understand wokeness is not as a religion but as a New Age therapeutic movement."
Kat Rosenfield on X - "I wrote an essay a few years ago about how wokeness is the new self-help, particularly in its appeal to upper middle class white women who *love* to pay to be told there’s something wrong with them"
Tyler Austin Harper on X - "My Lacanian reading is that people who love anti-racist self-flagellation are neurotics: “The true object sought out by the neurotic is a demand that he wants to be asked of him.” Being told how to fix your inner evil is preferable to uncertainty about who you are or how to live."
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "The politics and gender of self-loathing among American adolescents."
"Self-Derogation (USA 12th Graders)
Liberal Girls, Liberal Boys, Conservative Girls, Conservative Boys"
The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs
i/o on X - "When a UK Labour Party member debating Christopher Hitchens in 2005 claimed that 9/11 was just comeuppance for Western imperialism (and received applause from the audience for his remark), Hitchens responded: "This is masochism but it is being offered to you by sadists.""
Left wingers just hate the West
Kathleen Stock on X - "I don't think I could be any more disgusted with tendency of many high-profile women to put on their best primary school teacher voices and usher through terrifyingly stupid, morally bankrupt policies under the guise of "kindness"."
Meme - Ashley St. Clair @stclairashley: "The hostility towards motherhood and children from the Left is palpable"
"The New York Times. Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created"
Left wing anti-natalism
Ann Sinnott on X - "'Scouts have been encouraged to use gender-neutral language & drop the terms “mum and dad”. Members have been encouraged to guide children through a card game called “Pronoun Pairs”, which has been devised as a way of teaching them about gender identity.'"
The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦🏳️🌈 on X - "One thing that I used to dismiss as a right wing conspiracy but now realize is absolutely correct was this idea that far left ideologies under the Marxist umbrella are primarily intended to destroy the family unit, ostensibly to make room for the State to take it's place. Once you realize it you see it everywhere."
