Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

In a different form. My former employers bought into the idea that a team player exhibits certain attitudes and does not disagree with the new attitudes and ways.

I was a good team player and a high contributor, but I’m not the type to go along to get along and will voice my opinions.

Corporate culture can be just as bad only in a different form.

Great read, thanks for sharing.

 

Schools in NL in general are quite leftist/socialist. Thing is at the end of the day you can draw your own conclusions regarding what works and what does not work. Even in NL everybody knows that socialism can lead to more taxation and less personal wealth and that sacrifice is not always appreciated.

In NL some black pages of our history are finally being addressed but sometimes certain themes are pushed to hush others.
Example:

• The evil (because they were at the time) Germans were really mean to the Jews in W.W.II.
• Do not mention that (Dutch) civil servants assisted the Germans in hunting down and stealing the Jews' their wealth.

Either way, sometimes you need a strong drink or very fresh coffee before you can stomach some of these things.

In the end, a good teacher can balance out the advantages, disadvantages the why and the how. I am grateful I devoted a few years to digging in philosophy. You do end up with a hangover though. Seriously, philosophy is a very useful road to understand the world better. The moment you find the logic you can stop being afraid...

 

Personally I think this is all greatly overstated. If there is a "new orthodoxy" we also have to acknowledge that there was an "old orthodoxy" and that there is always an orthodoxy. And if there's always an orthodoxy then there are always people who find themselves either on the fringes or just plain outside that orthodoxy. There currently seems to be a bit of panic that people who previously found themselves firmly within the "orthodoxy" now find themselves outside of it, but at the same time there are people who have moved in the other direction, so is this really a net negative or just natural change? Is it really "disturbing" or just part of the way that societies always shift when there is a shift in who is driving the cultural "orthodoxy"?

When I was a kid going to a mostly white public school in Virginia many black parents found there was far too little taught about race relations in America and the impact it would have on their kids growing up, so I'm wholly unconvinced that it is a greater problem now that some parents find there is too much taught about race relations in their private schools.

 

The whole concept of orthodoxy is flawed. Orthodoxy was literally the “correct opinion” and what was orthodox was whatever the highest powers in the land, the church, council, or emperor, deemed as orthodox. Just like enforcing Christian orthodoxy only served to divide the church, race/ethnic orthodoxy from on high further serves to further divide and entrench people. Catering to the loudest voices is not usually the most prudent choice. This is the basic downfall of democratically elected officials that those other deciders of orthodoxy didn’t have. But that’s a catch 22 because then orthodoxy can change overnight while here, a majority of people have to be convinced or shamed into it. Those past powers that be wouldn’t just call you a racist and try to get you ostracized and fired, they would literally burn you alive.

The problem is that kids are taught that white , and now Asian people, the most attacked group in this country, are inherently racist. This is used to extract tangible things instead of teaching less well off groups how to get them themselves. Sins of the father and give the man a fish issues. The recent British study found there was a bit crazy (What about the Irish and Scottish people who aren’t the kind of Irish and Scots you see on TV except in gangster movies and Trainspotting?) but it’s impossible to disagree with some of its conclusions given the statistics shown:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities

 

White kids aren't being taught that they're inherently racist (at least not on a large scale, I can't account for every crazy lesson being taught in every small corner). Neither are Asian people. Are you conflating being taught that white supremacy exists with being taught that white people are inherently racist? I can't speak much to British society, I'd be too far out of my depth in terms experience and knowledge, but some "less well off groups" in America did not get that way simply because they weren't taught to get things for themselves but because our country was built to actively prevent it. Racism in America is a systemic problem, not just a matter of various personal attitudes about race.

 

The problem with this sort of analysis (essentially what "critical race theory" stands for) is what it says about human beings and being human. MLK & civil rights movement of the sixties was the assertion that racism is personal and should not be ensconced in the law - equality before the law. This new belief about racism not being personal, but rather "systemic", means that racism is put outside of the personal, in this case not the law but "society". This means that persons have to be manipulated from the outside systemically to correct the moral problem just as you say.

Persons and the personal then simply become cogs in the machine, and the personal is not only not valued but inherently morally suspect. Hegel and Marx thought of human beings in just this sort of way. MLK and every classical liberal of our cultural inheritance understood that such "systemic" thinking is inherently illiberal, unforgiving, and violent. It's violent because it rejects the personal - the personal is only a stumbling block to get around through manipulation from the outside rather than convincing the person through appeals to their conscience. Who needs the personal when violence will do...

 

I think you're misstating the overarching views of racism during the Civil Rights movement. The notion of systemic racism was well developed by that time, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) for example spoke a great deal about institutional racism, and he was hardly the only one. I don't think you're even representing MLKs views in their totality or complexity, but regardless he wasn't a monolith.

I don't think it's a rejection of the personal or an assertion that we're simply cogs in the machine to suggest that there are larger systems in any complex society that go beyond whatever personal interactions we may have.

 

institutional racism does not necessarily equal systemic racism and critical race theory. Yes, there was a range of thought and views and MLK torwards the end was certainly becoming impatient (to choose a word) and playing footsies with Hegelian/Marxist thought. Still in the main his work/writing and the civil rights movement of that period in the main remains a classical liberal project. The American people certainly accepted it on those terms, and as such it was wildly sussesful.

The (only slightly) later controversy over "quotas", to say nothing of the sexual revolution taking the movement over, reveal how non-liberal strands of it were not generally/widely accepted even if they were sometimes politically (mostly through sympathetic courts) successful.

No, society is the sum total of personal interactions in the mechanistic Hegelian and "critical race theory" view. The personal becomes "dumb", sort of like atoms smashing together in a solution. So along comes the chemist who manipulates it all from the outside. This is the ironic reduction of the personal (and thus the moral) to being a function of race - and the only solution is "postive" racism used to counter act the inherent, non personal, by *nature* (they are born that way) racism of whites, Asians, the privileged, etc.

 

I would agree that MLK's work was largely of a classical liberal bent, but I would also say that as successful as the Civil Rights movement was it was also an incomplete project. If we take school segregation as an example, yes the first step was to dismantle the codified racial basis for school segregation under Jim Crow, but the next step should have been to dismantle the societal basis for de facto segregation. The first step was accomplished, the second was not. Our schools remain largely segregated and majority black schools remain several steps behind for reasons that are baked into the way we fund and organize public schools. This might not be the result of personal, intentional racism, but if the outcome remains that black kids are more often left behind then the results are indication of a systemic problem.

I see where you're coming from, but I think this is based on a common misapprehension of critical race theory. I don't think the idea is that racism is inherent in certain individuals, but more that once racism is codified in the law and deeply embedded in institutions it can't simply be written off as a problem of the past or individual personality flaw that some people possess. And if it can't be written off as an problem of the individual, then there is a shared responsibility to address it.

 

I am afraid your the one with the misapprehension. Even a cursory familiarity with CRT (say the Wikipedia entry) reveals its anti liberal Hegelian roots. Even if I agreed with its and yours basic diagnosis of the relationship between institution/society and the individual vis-a-vis racism (or anything else), I am enough of a classical liberal to reject both your theoretical "cause" and the resultant prescriptions. It's time to quote Kendi again:

"The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.

The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

 

Haha Kendi's a bit over the top. Anyway, your position is fair. Needless to say we've reached very different conclusions.

 

I do not know exactly what "Haha" means in this context. By Kendi's criteria "I Have a Dream"
is a hate speech.

 

It means "I've read some of his work, it's interesting. He sometimes makes a convenient punching bag, often unfairly, but I don't want to get on some tangent about where Kendi falls on the genious-to-absolute-evil scale"

 

I'm as usual getting burnt out of people calling me what to think. This goes for both sides, why I trigger people when I say Trump is a former NYC Democrat? Why I trigger people when I say that there is a good sizable majority of Americans who don't want open borders? When saying the truth trigger both sides?

It's the black/white mindset is what got us some wonderful "winners" in Congress. Classic Liberalism and Critical Thinking has went into the trash bin since I was in the public school system (which isn't too long ago for me) and before I think I was even born.

 

The world is a pretty fucked up place. I’m thankful for music, booze and weed and klonopin and Zoloft to help me cope.

 

You can keep the k-pin's and zoloft. I'll just put them up on that tall shelf with my old adderall prescription.

The world got a little less fucked up when they started letting us smoke cannabis again. I mean... yeah, they took a cheap and plentiful resource and funneled it into the ineffable grandstream of greed that is our economy... so that sucks. But you know? I find that if I eat enough 90% THC distillate, it's not so much of an existential problem anymore, as I quickly become preoccupied with ascertaining the boundary line between my being, and the couch. Now, the value of trading one existential plight for another is rightly debatable, but that is another conversation entirely. ENTIRELY.

Probably no way to live, if I'm honest. But I also don't think the world is incorrigible. Sometimes I think we are just addicted to struggle. Like, the story of the original sin would've happened eventually, even if we were actually dropped into utopia. We NEED that shit to have purpose. People have been dancing around the imminent fall of humanity since the spoken word days. Sometimes I really do believe that people look forward to it... like on some level, they need for everything to be un-fuckably fucked in order to be okay with it. It's always *just about* over. Some things never change.

If there is a God, he'll probably make humanity last forever just to fuck with us. There's something in us that almost needs that to not be true. We have problems with things that are random. And things with no clear beginnings or endings. These things seem to really upset us, for some reason. It simply HAS to be a part of a progression... whether it's growth or decline, there has to be that bigger picture... a story or narrative. There's gotta be something to it, some fate waiting on the other side of the moment. Utopia is off of the table - too on the nose for anyone to convince themselves of. Whereas the idea that the world is in decline almost seems like a logical observation. It's easier, and perhaps even comforting to envision us as being on a downward spiral... somehow that is more palatable than the notion that we are simply adrift in cosmic soup and there is actually nothing inherently special about any of this. If the world is ending, we can at least tell ourselves that we have something that's worth it right now. What's scarier? Dying horribly? Or being made to have never existed in any meaningful way?

We're funny creatures, man. Humans are weird. Being a person is weird as hell.

All that said, gratitude is indeed the answer. And it's the hardest goddamned thing you'll ever have to hold onto. You'll get lots of offers for trades. Almost never worth it. And yet... the moment we find ourselves lacking in some way, we'll all be giving it away. Always when it's the last thing we need to be doing, too. Maybe we really are fucked


Honestly, I say we outlived our true purpose a long time ago and that's... y'know... the reason, for everything. Our prime directive was simply to survive. And we've done a pretty good job, there. We've even managed to extend our average lifespan by using our bodies to better leverage our bodies in taking care of themselves. We might even be a little too good at not dying at this point. We could choke out this planet. It's like ever since we figured this little kill-eat-fuck game out, we've kind of just been making up reasons for ourselves to be here... just kinda standing around expecting some big event. Or maybe kinda like a little kid up way past bedtime.

But that is to say - it's all extra. Bonus points. It may all be meaningless but still you are here, somehow. I think.

See... this is my problem. People wanna talk about the state of the world like somehow they can understand it, but I'm still over here waiting for someone to get me up to speed on the whole 'nature of existence' thing, which I assume others must understand to be elementary issues, considering they're out there trying to solve whatever they think the problems are with it. People really think they know what happens. It's wild that we're all like this.

 

Here is what every racist person should experience. Go to a school and/or organisation where you are a definite minority and you really stand out.

I went to a mostly white school and a very white middle school. People think you are exotic but you as a person just think "oh I am just me." What made it worse is that I have mixed roots, Dutch dad but my mother is exotic.

Some people accept you. Some people see a walking target. Whatever the case, if you do not stand up for yourself people treat you like a doormat. Only the nerds and the street kids really accepted me. That was it. I hated middle school despite having some good friends there.

So many people throughout history have come with beautiful words and ideas. At the end of the day I say "Fuck that, if I like you as a person that is enough. If not, do not bother me." I need a name, a face and a personality and when you have sense of humour or a good story hell yeah.

So many -isms. I keep it simple...

 

Narrative it is. As a character in the story, understanding the form of life-in-a-story but not being able to know the story, that's the difficulty. To see the story as a whole would be no longer be character in the story, but a reader - or a god. We are not gods however. Interesting how the ancient Hebrews had a fallen angel tell (but we don't know if she was convinced) the archetypal 'first' humans that they woud be "like God" if they would only grasp the story from the outside (as it were) and not as a character in it...

 

Not sure if this counts but I should have listened to my own advice regarding stocks from a week ago.

Pelosi and husband buy $10M worth of MSFT options in early March. March 31 they announce the augmented reality contract with the military.

Still amongst my top 5 least favorite politicians for too many reasons. TF does she keep winning?

 

Envy too stronk.