Recommended, especially the first half hour or so:
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Glenn Loury on how we’re being swept along by hysteria about racism in America — 16 Comments
I was listening to Bret Weinstein’s podcast with John McWhorter and that led me to Loury’s podcast “The Glenn Show”. The September 11,2019 episode with Loury and McWhorter, “ A Critical Look at the 1619 Project” is worth a listen.
One wonders what Charles Mackay (famous Scottish author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) would make of our current moment of collective insanity and mass psychosis. Rational argument cannot prevail against those who have surrendered abjectly to the high priests of the cult of “anti-racism”, and very soon the lies of the 1619 Project (despite the best efforts of several brave black scholars at 1776Unites) will be taught to schoolchildren throughout the land as uncontested truth.
One thing I have noticed is that all of the talk about racial problems focuses on the bad behavior of black boys and men. Maybe we need to look a the Dagger John method of turning around the Irish communities. He started with women. Today’s black girls are told that rappers who call the Ho’s and brag about baby daddies are OK (and got invited to Obama’s WH). Maybe if people started telling the girls to stand up for themselves and not reward the bad guys with sex, things could start to change.
Their is so much talk about women’s empowerment, but women’s biggest power is in deciding what kind of guys will have standing in the community. And then they also have to reward the guys in the home–eg.,cook them dinner, let them talk if they have had a rough day at work.
expat: “Maybe if people started telling the girls to stand up for themselves and not reward the bad guys with sex, things could start to change.”
Before that will work, the welfare system has to be reformed. Being a single mother on welfare is perfectly acceptable now. Remember “The Life of Julia” from the Obama years? Yes, the government agrees to be the “Daddy” and take care of Julia and her offspring – cradle to grave. For a few young women, this might not look attractive. They might want more out of life. Unfortunately, most do not. So the culture of dependence persists. And fatherless boys are left to fend for themselves. Why don’t some of these millionaire black athletes, black entertainment stars, or successful black businessmen go into the hood and try to make a difference? Stand up as role models? IMO, it’s because they know it won’t make a dent.
A life where you are taken care of, even at a low level, is enough for many, many people, not just blacks. And there is no societal pressure to change. No shame in being on the dole.
Years ago in another life, I was working as a geologist doing field work in the Uinta Basin in Utah. One day we came across a Ute Indian village. (The Uinta basin has a sizable Ute reservation.) We spent some time talking with the head man. He and most of the men had college degrees from Utah colleges. But they preferred to live in a rustic hogan deep in the Uinta Basin. They had many head of sheep that they used for meat and sold the wool for money. They each received a check from the U.S. government every month. All of them had nice pick up trucks and their boots were factory made. Lots of giggling youngsters running about and wives sitting in front of their homes. I asked the chief if he didn’t think he was wasting a good college education. He laughed and asked me why he should give up his life for mine. To tell the truth, I could see his point. Uncle Sam had guaranteed his life style for as long as he wanted. Dependency as a life style can be easy to accept.
Without a father’s guiding hand, the young boys of the hood grow up like weeds. The question is, how does society provide them with surrogate fathers? How can society improve their education? How can society teach them ethics, instill ambition, and give them pride? If we could answer those questions, I would be more hopeful.
Welfare has, for the most part, ruined the black family. 70% of children are born out of wedlock. That is the real problem, not systemic racism. IMO, BLM is not about racism, it is about communism. That truth must be exposed. That is the way to snap out of the hysteria.
Not I, says the little red rooster.
In an article published first in “Asia Times” and later at “PJ Media,” Spengler (David Goldman) argues that the scale and intensity of African-Americans’ response to George Floyd’s death can be attributed to a sense of humiliation.
This sense of humiliation has two causes: 1) for their own safety, blacks depend on the authority of governments that are still largely white-dominated, and 2) black males who go to college largely fail to earn a degree, and their hopes of upward mobility are thus crushed.
“The fact that the increased safety of black communities depends upon measures imposed from the outside by a largely white state power is humiliating. It comes on top of other humiliations, of which the most onerous is the fake promise of upward mobility through university education.”
“Among white 18-year-olds, 42% will attend college versus 37% for blacks and 36% for Hispanics. The percentage of young blacks of college age who will attend university in the United States is not much different from that of whites. But under 34% of black males at US universities will graduate within six years (the standard program is four years). These are shocking numbers. Of this 37%, only a third, or 12.5% of college-age black men, will obtain university degrees. Almost one-quarter of all black men of college age will try and fail. Those were the black youth who stayed out of trouble, graduated from high school, and sought advancement in the university system – but ended up at the bottom of the greasy pole. That is a humiliation on a gigantic scale.”
Was diversity a motive? And thus there is cause for cautious optimism and an opportunity to mitigate progress (i.e. [unqualified] monotonic change). #PrinciplesMatter
#BabyLivesMatter #Reconcile
Cornflour, thanks for the link to Goldman’s essay. I think he is on to something. The way George Floyd died was horrifying and humiliating. If you felt there was animus in the policemen’s hearts toward your racial group, it could make you feel a deep sense of humiliation and powerlessness. That could certainly explain a lot of the protests. Yet, when you look deeply into the motivations of BLM and ANTIFA, it is not a fair deal for all blacks they are looking for. They want to tear the system down and that is quite different than reforms that lift people up. Marxism is an attractive lie that, although it kills in the millions, persists. How do we put an end to it once and for all?
This is great. Thanks for the link.
I’m very struck by Glenn Loury and have watched a number of his hour-long shows on Bloggingheads, where he usually appears with John McWhorter (also black). I find their dialogues often quite compelling. I recommend them highly. They’re all available on YouTube, free.
I love Dan Crenshaw, but he is right and wrong at the same time.
Liberals, naively tolerant of the mob, are always the first victims. Eager to appear as progressive allies, they give inch after inch until they’ve completely compromised the values they claim to stand for. Conservatives tried to warn our liberal friends. We tried to tell them that decades of identity politics and increasing flirtation with far-left ideology would end up here. Now, they have been trampled over completely by radical progressives, purged from the New York Times opinion section, from academia, and from Congress.
The warnings were not heeded because they were never backed up with any negative consequences.
The Gramscian March proceeded more like an epidemic than a parade: only a few people infected at first, then an exponential explosion when the virus was not stopped.
Because it started with just a few crazies in the ivory towers, a couple of nuts on the city council, and those naive bleeding-heart liberals at the country club, and their goals and intentions always sounded so good — who (even among conservatives) wanted to speak out against freedom and justice and taking care of people?
But they became the core of cluster after cluster of infection.
The bait-and-switch that substituted socialism and hate for democracy and tolerance at first went on behind the public scenes, and those who should have been the Watchmen, the press and our government leaders, were actually working with the invaders — a cytokine storm of the body politic.
In contrast to the ebb and flow of eternally shifting multiparty systems, America has a rigid, inflexible two-party choice:
One party is supposed to be the party of big government, the other the party of small government. When the Big Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger, and, when the Small Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger.
One party is supposed to be the party of social liberalism, the other the party of social conservatism. When the Socially Liberal Party is in power, the country gets more liberal, and, when the Socially Conservative Party is in power, the country gets more liberal.
One party is supposed to be the party of foreign-policy doves, the other the party of foreign-policy hawks. When the doves are in power, America loses wars, and, when the hawks are in power, America loses wars.
So much for American conservatism’s three-legged stool. “Mainstream” Republican candidates are essentially reduced to the argument: This time it’ll be different, I promise.
Epidemics of disease, whether of the body or the mind, have to be nipped in the bud, but (as with the coronavirus beginning, when only a few people were sick and none had yet died), who would have tolerated the measures necessary then to stop the morphing of liberals into progressives into socialist-anarchists or whatever they are now?
Crenshaw:
The good news is that it’s not too late. It’s never too late, not so long as good and decent people remain standing and willing to do something. There are a lot of us who love this great country, believe in the promise of its Founding, and aren’t keen on letting a mob rip it apart. All we have to do is speak out. We must hold the line and demand that our elected leaders stop allowing their cities to burn, that corporate America stop caving to Twitter hordes and becoming complicit in the cultural destruction, and that our educators stop teaching our kids that America is evil.
If speaking out was all we had to do, we would already be doing it.
The problem with Crenshaw’s advice is that speaking out — those warnings conservatives try to give — has very often come with a loss: at first, just being de-friended, and (worse) ostracized from the family; but, once the infection took hold, at great personal cost, with being fired, harassed, threatened, physically assaulted, and so forth.
And even if there are more conservatives willing to speak out, now that the stakes are on the table and the cards being played, how does Crenshaw think we can enforce those demands that he advises?
The politicians and corporations and teachers are not going to suddenly start doing now what we couldn’t get them to do for the last fifty years.
Even with cities burning, many people who want the carnage to stop still don’t want to also accept that force (legal and physical) will be required.
How does Mr. Crenshaw, who I respect and admire, propose that conservatives speak out about something like this?
The March of the Morons has breached the gates of Disneyland:
Disney’s Splash Mountain ride, the famous log flume that’s popular at both the Disneyland and Disney World theme parks, is getting a facelift. And not just any ol’ facelift, but a major one that will finally scrub Splash Mountain of its ties to Walt Disney’s infamously insensitive 1946 film Song of the South.
The Walt Disney Parks division announced Thursday that a project to “completely reimagine” Splash Mountain began last year, and that the ride’s new theme is inspired by Disney’s 2009 animated film The Princess and the Frog. The film notably stars Disney’s first black princess, Tiana, who arrived 72 years after Snow White kicked off the Disney Princess canon.
Among the victims of the “re-imagining” is this once beloved song, a three-decade fixture at Splash Mountain complete with special lyrics:
…
Ours is an age of stunted vengeful hacks who cannot create anything new but only wreck everything old, and have now determined to erase everything beyond their own shriveled imaginations. When you’re told you can no longer sing a song, the only response is to cry “Encore!” and bellow it even louder. So here from a couple of years back is my Song of the Week essay on “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah”:
“…swept along…”
But the tide will turn when good people start to get passionate about the things that really matter….beginning with the Truth. https://twitter.com/LadyRedWave/status/1277390663990964224
(Retweeted on Sidney Powell’s twitter feed.)
@ Aesop: Not all too surprising. Disney has turned into a “friendly” SJW. Their material isn’t all too inspiring as well. From their diversity princess casting, to their handling of Star Wars, to their push for LGBT+ with their short Out! Disney is trying to play to arguably the most contrived political denominator. They try to be cute while subtly inserting the after-school message of “we’re all in the together no matter our differences!” I honestly didn’t care much for Frozen and other Disney animations that came out in the past. The 90s were a golden age for Disney. In comparison, Pixar, in general, and Ghibli remained superior for the past decade or so.
“How does Mr. Crenshaw, who I respect and admire, propose that conservatives speak out about something like this?”
Conservatives don’t need to speak. They just need to stop spending their money. Yes, it’s a pain in the neck to not be able to go to some place like Disneyland but how many state and federal parks are out there? National monuments? Historic birthplaces? Annual conventions and get-togethers of one sort or another?
Mike
who would have tolerated the measures necessary then to stop the morphing of liberals into progressives into socialist-anarchists or whatever they are now?
Who do ya think son?
Cpt moroni wasn’t a moron, and neither was Y, regardless of the detractors here.
Epidemics of disease, whether of the body or the mind, have to be nipped in the bud, but (as with the coronavirus beginning, when only a few people were sick and none had yet died)
That’s how Utah turned into a place run by mormonism, which has defensive triggers. Instead of rooting out those who did not have their lights lit, it was circle the wagons, a maneuver by the minority not the majority, that culminated in Demoncrat mormons or Utah peeps.
The point is pretty clear if you read the Book of Mormon. The Nephites and the Lamanites, destroyed each other. Sound familiar, son? There were no righteous people left.
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I was listening to Bret Weinstein’s podcast with John McWhorter and that led me to Loury’s podcast “The Glenn Show”. The September 11,2019 episode with Loury and McWhorter, “ A Critical Look at the 1619 Project” is worth a listen.
One wonders what Charles Mackay (famous Scottish author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) would make of our current moment of collective insanity and mass psychosis. Rational argument cannot prevail against those who have surrendered abjectly to the high priests of the cult of “anti-racism”, and very soon the lies of the 1619 Project (despite the best efforts of several brave black scholars at 1776Unites) will be taught to schoolchildren throughout the land as uncontested truth.
One thing I have noticed is that all of the talk about racial problems focuses on the bad behavior of black boys and men. Maybe we need to look a the Dagger John method of turning around the Irish communities. He started with women. Today’s black girls are told that rappers who call the Ho’s and brag about baby daddies are OK (and got invited to Obama’s WH). Maybe if people started telling the girls to stand up for themselves and not reward the bad guys with sex, things could start to change.
Their is so much talk about women’s empowerment, but women’s biggest power is in deciding what kind of guys will have standing in the community. And then they also have to reward the guys in the home–eg.,cook them dinner, let them talk if they have had a rough day at work.
expat: “Maybe if people started telling the girls to stand up for themselves and not reward the bad guys with sex, things could start to change.”
Before that will work, the welfare system has to be reformed. Being a single mother on welfare is perfectly acceptable now. Remember “The Life of Julia” from the Obama years? Yes, the government agrees to be the “Daddy” and take care of Julia and her offspring – cradle to grave. For a few young women, this might not look attractive. They might want more out of life. Unfortunately, most do not. So the culture of dependence persists. And fatherless boys are left to fend for themselves. Why don’t some of these millionaire black athletes, black entertainment stars, or successful black businessmen go into the hood and try to make a difference? Stand up as role models? IMO, it’s because they know it won’t make a dent.
A life where you are taken care of, even at a low level, is enough for many, many people, not just blacks. And there is no societal pressure to change. No shame in being on the dole.
Years ago in another life, I was working as a geologist doing field work in the Uinta Basin in Utah. One day we came across a Ute Indian village. (The Uinta basin has a sizable Ute reservation.) We spent some time talking with the head man. He and most of the men had college degrees from Utah colleges. But they preferred to live in a rustic hogan deep in the Uinta Basin. They had many head of sheep that they used for meat and sold the wool for money. They each received a check from the U.S. government every month. All of them had nice pick up trucks and their boots were factory made. Lots of giggling youngsters running about and wives sitting in front of their homes. I asked the chief if he didn’t think he was wasting a good college education. He laughed and asked me why he should give up his life for mine. To tell the truth, I could see his point. Uncle Sam had guaranteed his life style for as long as he wanted. Dependency as a life style can be easy to accept.
Without a father’s guiding hand, the young boys of the hood grow up like weeds. The question is, how does society provide them with surrogate fathers? How can society improve their education? How can society teach them ethics, instill ambition, and give them pride? If we could answer those questions, I would be more hopeful.
Welfare has, for the most part, ruined the black family. 70% of children are born out of wedlock. That is the real problem, not systemic racism. IMO, BLM is not about racism, it is about communism. That truth must be exposed. That is the way to snap out of the hysteria.
Not I, says the little red rooster.
In an article published first in “Asia Times” and later at “PJ Media,” Spengler (David Goldman) argues that the scale and intensity of African-Americans’ response to George Floyd’s death can be attributed to a sense of humiliation.
This sense of humiliation has two causes: 1) for their own safety, blacks depend on the authority of governments that are still largely white-dominated, and 2) black males who go to college largely fail to earn a degree, and their hopes of upward mobility are thus crushed.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/the-humiliation-and-rage-of-black-america/
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-p-goldman/2020/06/14/horror-and-humiliation-in-minneapolis-n527736
Here are two relevant paragraphs:
“The fact that the increased safety of black communities depends upon measures imposed from the outside by a largely white state power is humiliating. It comes on top of other humiliations, of which the most onerous is the fake promise of upward mobility through university education.”
“Among white 18-year-olds, 42% will attend college versus 37% for blacks and 36% for Hispanics. The percentage of young blacks of college age who will attend university in the United States is not much different from that of whites. But under 34% of black males at US universities will graduate within six years (the standard program is four years). These are shocking numbers. Of this 37%, only a third, or 12.5% of college-age black men, will obtain university degrees. Almost one-quarter of all black men of college age will try and fail. Those were the black youth who stayed out of trouble, graduated from high school, and sought advancement in the university system – but ended up at the bottom of the greasy pole. That is a humiliation on a gigantic scale.”
Was diversity a motive? And thus there is cause for cautious optimism and an opportunity to mitigate progress (i.e. [unqualified] monotonic change). #PrinciplesMatter
#BabyLivesMatter #Reconcile
Cornflour, thanks for the link to Goldman’s essay. I think he is on to something. The way George Floyd died was horrifying and humiliating. If you felt there was animus in the policemen’s hearts toward your racial group, it could make you feel a deep sense of humiliation and powerlessness. That could certainly explain a lot of the protests. Yet, when you look deeply into the motivations of BLM and ANTIFA, it is not a fair deal for all blacks they are looking for. They want to tear the system down and that is quite different than reforms that lift people up. Marxism is an attractive lie that, although it kills in the millions, persists. How do we put an end to it once and for all?
This is great. Thanks for the link.
I’m very struck by Glenn Loury and have watched a number of his hour-long shows on Bloggingheads, where he usually appears with John McWhorter (also black). I find their dialogues often quite compelling. I recommend them highly. They’re all available on YouTube, free.
I love Dan Crenshaw, but he is right and wrong at the same time.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/we-cant-let-the-outrage-mob-win/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=fifth
The warnings were not heeded because they were never backed up with any negative consequences.
The Gramscian March proceeded more like an epidemic than a parade: only a few people infected at first, then an exponential explosion when the virus was not stopped.
Because it started with just a few crazies in the ivory towers, a couple of nuts on the city council, and those naive bleeding-heart liberals at the country club, and their goals and intentions always sounded so good — who (even among conservatives) wanted to speak out against freedom and justice and taking care of people?
But they became the core of cluster after cluster of infection.
The bait-and-switch that substituted socialism and hate for democracy and tolerance at first went on behind the public scenes, and those who should have been the Watchmen, the press and our government leaders, were actually working with the invaders — a cytokine storm of the body politic.
https://www.steynonline.com/7432/the-world-they-made
January 21, 2016
Epidemics of disease, whether of the body or the mind, have to be nipped in the bud, but (as with the coronavirus beginning, when only a few people were sick and none had yet died), who would have tolerated the measures necessary then to stop the morphing of liberals into progressives into socialist-anarchists or whatever they are now?
Crenshaw:
If speaking out was all we had to do, we would already be doing it.
The problem with Crenshaw’s advice is that speaking out — those warnings conservatives try to give — has very often come with a loss: at first, just being de-friended, and (worse) ostracized from the family; but, once the infection took hold, at great personal cost, with being fired, harassed, threatened, physically assaulted, and so forth.
And even if there are more conservatives willing to speak out, now that the stakes are on the table and the cards being played, how does Crenshaw think we can enforce those demands that he advises?
The politicians and corporations and teachers are not going to suddenly start doing now what we couldn’t get them to do for the last fifty years.
Even with cities burning, many people who want the carnage to stop still don’t want to also accept that force (legal and physical) will be required.
How does Mr. Crenshaw, who I respect and admire, propose that conservatives speak out about something like this?
https://www.steynonline.com/9043/zip-a-dee-doo-dah
“…swept along…”
But the tide will turn when good people start to get passionate about the things that really matter….beginning with the Truth.
https://twitter.com/LadyRedWave/status/1277390663990964224
(Retweeted on Sidney Powell’s twitter feed.)
Compare with this obscene piece from (where else?) the NYT:
https://twitter.com/jbinnall/status/1277420656326594560
(Retweeted on Margot Cleveland’s twitter feed.)
@ Aesop: Not all too surprising. Disney has turned into a “friendly” SJW. Their material isn’t all too inspiring as well. From their diversity princess casting, to their handling of Star Wars, to their push for LGBT+ with their short Out! Disney is trying to play to arguably the most contrived political denominator. They try to be cute while subtly inserting the after-school message of “we’re all in the together no matter our differences!” I honestly didn’t care much for Frozen and other Disney animations that came out in the past. The 90s were a golden age for Disney. In comparison, Pixar, in general, and Ghibli remained superior for the past decade or so.
“How does Mr. Crenshaw, who I respect and admire, propose that conservatives speak out about something like this?”
Conservatives don’t need to speak. They just need to stop spending their money. Yes, it’s a pain in the neck to not be able to go to some place like Disneyland but how many state and federal parks are out there? National monuments? Historic birthplaces? Annual conventions and get-togethers of one sort or another?
Mike
who would have tolerated the measures necessary then to stop the morphing of liberals into progressives into socialist-anarchists or whatever they are now?
Who do ya think son?
Cpt moroni wasn’t a moron, and neither was Y, regardless of the detractors here.
Epidemics of disease, whether of the body or the mind, have to be nipped in the bud, but (as with the coronavirus beginning, when only a few people were sick and none had yet died)
That’s how Utah turned into a place run by mormonism, which has defensive triggers. Instead of rooting out those who did not have their lights lit, it was circle the wagons, a maneuver by the minority not the majority, that culminated in Demoncrat mormons or Utah peeps.
The point is pretty clear if you read the Book of Mormon. The Nephites and the Lamanites, destroyed each other. Sound familiar, son? There were no righteous people left.