Links - 29th November 2018 (2)

Anders Carlson-Wee's Use of Black English in The Nation - "while verdicts on statutes of limitations will differ, barely anyone alive recalls seeing a minstrel show in person. It is ever harder to draw a meaningful line of influence from white (and black) men guffawing on stage during the Taft administration and anything being created today. But more to the point, the Black English Carlson-Wee uses is not exaggerated: It is true and ordinary black speech... Whence the outrage among so many against black people depicted accurately speaking in a way that, well, a great many definitely do?... We often say that we want whites to understand black pain, the black experience, black difference. We want them to empathize. But upon achieving this understanding, white artists, as artists, will naturally seek to express it through their creations. Are we to decree that they must not? Would this muzzling of basic human creativity, as well as the fundamental drive to share between cultures, be worth something larger?I’m not sure what that would be, other than a sense of victory in having laid down and enforced the diktat—and the novelty of that would wear off fast. Rather, Carlson-Wee, as a young white man dedicating a poem to a homeless black person’s suffering and trying to get inside her head, would seem to be displaying exactly the kind of empathy that we seek. “Feel it but don’t show it,” we tell him, instead. “Empathize, but block that empathy from your creative impulses, on the pain of hurting us by imitating us without our consent.”... to the extent that any white person’s depiction of Black English of whatever quality or diligence elicits rolling eyes at best and social media witch hunts at worst, we have lost step not only with linguistic science, but also with what most would consider norms of how human groups co-occupy social spaces and learn from one another."

Harry Potter vs. Huckleberry Finn: Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories Than Americans - "Their history informs fantastical myths and legends, while American tales tend to focus on moral realism."

Jordan Peterson’s people are not who you think they are - "he associates efforts to stamp out what he sees as biologically informed sexual differences with the bogey of ideology and “Mao’s murderous Cultural Revolution.” From their perches in women’s studies departments or in the bureaucracies of equality-minded Scandinavian countries, feminist ideologues want to upend the world. “Their goal is to restructure the patriarchy,” he told podcast host Joe Rogan in 2016. “The patriarchy is Western civilization. And what does restructure mean? That’s easy—it means tear it down.”... “If you don’t want to negotiate a higher salary, that’s your prerogative,” he says. “It’s easy to blame the system about everything.”... “I lived most of my life in the Middle East, in a climate where you’ve got to be careful about what you say,” says D’Sa. “There’s laws around it, there’s societal pressure, and when I came to North America, that wasn’t there to the same degree. But then I saw it growing.”... “A lot of the people are first-generation immigrants who come largely from countries like Iran, and all over the Middle East, China—all first-generation immigrants. But they call us Nazis—like a bunch of Asian, brown Nazis!”... “These guys have been raised with a lot of ‘don’t do this’—don’t be sexist, don’t make women feel uncomfortable. Now they don’t know what to do, so they do nothing.”

Why Is Jordan Peterson So Popular? - "What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives. That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology. All of these young people, without quite realizing it, were joining a huge group of American college students who were pursuing a parallel curriculum, right under the noses of the people who were delivering their official educations... there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it? It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind"

Jordan Peterson Rallies Portlandia’s Dissidents - "The 3,000-seat theatre was almost entirely filled—not with angry young white men as I was led to believe by protesters but a diverse crowd that included many women and people of color. This surprised and bothered some of the protesters I spoke to. “All of the women here, I don’t really understand why anybody would support somebody who is—I mean, it’s just disgusting,” said one demonstrator who declined to give her name."

What the left gets wrong about Jordan Peterson | J Oliver Conroy - "When news consumers get around to reading or watching Peterson’s work for themselves, they often find his ideas far less radical than characterized – and feel betrayed by the media and cultural elite’s representation of Peterson. The notion that there is nothing redeemable in Peterson’s message – and the accompanying assumption that any fan of his is beneath contempt – is not only wrong, but represents a rather bleak, zero-sum vision of politics. The left’s most profound message used to be that all human beings deserve dignity and worth, and those who need help should receive it, regardless of their race or gender or class or other characteristic. If that axiom still holds true – these days I’m not always sure – then it applies to many of Peterson’s fans."

Hate on Jordan Peterson all you want, but he's tapping into frustration that feminists shouldn't ignore - "For all his flaws, Peterson is tapping into a very real frustration: More than half a century after the modern feminist revolution began in the 1960s, we have yet to figure out new rules for partnership between men and women... Consider: We have rejected traditional sexist proprieties that forbade coarse language in front of “the ladies,” yet a man can now be fired for telling a crude joke that offends a female co-worker. Calling women “the weaker sex” would be considered shockingly retrograde, yet ambivalent sexual encounters are easily recast as violations of women, with men presumed entirely responsible for ensuring consent. Workplace romances abound, yet flirting could be one step away from someone’s idea of sexual harassment... one of Peterson’s central themes is that men in the modern Western world are in crisis. Crisis or no, there is certainly evidence that many men and boys have been left struggling by the cultural transformations of recent decades... Despite occasional lip service to the idea that feminism can liberate men too from patriarchal confines, most feminist discourse spends far more time bashing men for trivial transgressions... male troubles are met with “What about the menz?” mockery. Just look at the debate about Peterson. British journalist Helen Lewis has jeered that he is viewed as a serious intellectual “because he’s writing for sad young white men — and their problems are, you know, real problems.”... For all its successes, contemporary feminism’s main message to men is not one of equal partnership. Rather, it’s: Repent, abase yourself, and be an obedient feminist ally — and we still won’t trust you. It’s no wonder that Peterson has found an eager audience in this climate. If feminists don’t like his message, they should offer a better one."

Jordan Peterson vs 'New York Times': Vitriol Out of Proportion to the ‘Threat’ - "Rarely in my life have I read a more hostile or vicious takedown of a public figure than last week’s New York Times profile of Canadian author and psychologist Jordan Peterson. Rarely have I witnessed a more bizarre and bad-faith interview of a public figure than journalist Cathy Newman’s January interrogation of Peterson on Britain’s Channel 4 News. Few public figures inspire more vitriol and mockery on Twitter than, you guessed it, Jordan Peterson. And never before have I seen vitriol so out of proportion to the “threat” of the man’s underlying message... when people actually respond to that message, the shock is even more seismic. It’s difficult to overstate the extent to which the Left has long been (and, crucially, felt) culturally ascendant in America’s secular spaces. The academy, pop culture, mainstream media, corporate America — all of these spaces have drunk deeply of the Left’s cultural Kool-Aid, especially when it comes to matters of sex and gender. The holdouts are in the church and synagogue, and their borders are shrinking under relentless cultural assault... It’s not that men (and many women) failed to adjust to the new gender ideologies, it’s that the new gender ideologies too often fail to reckon with our deepest human longings and fail to recognize our fundamental human nature"

The Shocking Truth About Jordan Peterson - "The Times piece brought to its conclusion a dialectic that has increasingly consumed the news media in the age of Twitter. A narrative generated on social media is fed back into the “mainstream” press, and then in turn fed back into Twitter in the form of reporting that appears to confirm the pre-existing narrative... Here is the Achilles’ heel of the campaign to oust Jordan Peterson from the margins of respectable society: You don’t have to outsource your judgment to journalistic authorities in the age of the internet. You can see for yourself... In times of extremism, moderation itself can come to seem the greater enemy to those ideologically possessed, in part because it is the true danger: The public will tend to move toward it by default, and thus the instinctive recourse by those who sense the fragility of their extreme doctrines resort to coercive means to prevail in arguments they would not otherwise win."

Jordan Peterson: Why young men love rock star psychologist - "He’s preaching strength and resilience during a time when victimhood is the primary means of gaining status and respect. Sociologists call this “victimhood culture”, and many argue that we’re currently living in one. In victimhood cultures, respect is given to those who publicise their oppression, victimisation and, ultimately, their lack of responsibility over their lives. Victimhood is, after all, antithetical to responsibility. A victim is someone who isn’t responsible for their state of affairs. Dr Peterson’s response: “Life is an existential catastrophe and a tragedy.” We’re all victims in life. You’re not owed anything because you’re a victim. That’s not the answer."

How awful is Jordan Peterson, anyway? - "he's more like a frontier folk hero – someone who's not afraid to take on the bad guys and battle the forces of disorder and chaos. Many of his beliefs are perfectly unexceptionable – or would have been, until recently. He does not believe that women are systematically oppressed by men, or that Western culture is the source of all the world's ills, or that the idea of gender binaries is a vicious fiction. Only in a world dominated by identity politics would he be demonized as a dangerous reactionary. Still, he drives his critics into a frenzy. His debacle of a debate with Cathy Newman is a good example. She aggressively restated whatever he said to make it sound hateful, inflated and absurd. He kept his cool while she lost hers. She was obviously ill-prepared for his inconvenient barrage of logic and facts."

Cathy Newman’s feminist fans aimed 30 times more violent sexist abuse at Peterson & his supporters than vice-versa - "By now you can’t have missed Cathy Newman’s car crash interview with the amazing Jordan Peterson. Newman was utterly humiliated, throughout and was made to look even more foolish than in her 2016 “interview” of Milo Yiannopoulos, after which we exposed an elected Labour Member of Parliament advocated punching Milo. Ironically, that same MP, Anna Turley, is also the lead figure behind a proposed “social Media Malicious Communications Bill!” Newman and Channel 4 are using the age old feminist tactic of crying “abuse” when they lose a debate... It’s of note that none of the tweets we saw used remotely misogynistic language as claimed by Newman/Channel 4 and the only sexism combined with violence was from journalist Kate Bevan and aimed at Peterson... So, as per the headline, that’s over 30 times more abuse directed at Peterson and his supporters, and of course most of it from a verified Twitter account and its followers. One has to wonder what Channel 4 will be doing about that?"

Children's book: Grandparents must ask for consent before physically touching their grandchildren - "Author Eleanor Morrison said she decided to base the story on a white boy because white boys become privileged white men who have to be taught how to be responsible with their power."
Like forced hugging, forced handshakes violate bodily integrity. Teach kids they don't need to shake hands if they don't want to. Then teach them that if they're socially ostracized it's society's fault and they're being oppressed.

Report: Google Protected Executives Accused of Sexual Misconduct for Years - "“How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’” outlines how the progressive tech giant Google protected three executives that were accused of sexual misconduct for more than a decade. The article notes that Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android mobile operating system, left the company in October and was given a “hero’s farewell” by executives at the company... Even more worrying is the fact that this is not the first time that Google has covered up for an executive accused of sexual misconduct... Notably, former Google and (later parent company) Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is revealed in the article to have kept his mistress on the payroll as a “company consultant.” Schmidt has been a long-time supporter of Hillary Clinton and even expressed interest in being “head outside advisor” to Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign."
No wonder they removed Don't Be Evil
So much for diversity

University of Michigan Hosts Mandatory Anti-Semitic Lecture Comparing Netanyahu to Hitler - "The University of Michigan hosted speaker Emory Douglas as part of a mandatory lecture series required for the university’s art students, who compared Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, labeling both “guilty of genocide,” in a presentation students called anti-Semitic."