A documentary on the cult of anti-racism in academia: Evergreen
I covered some of the events that took place at Evergreen College in 2017, a situation that catapulted Bret Weinstein into minor celebrity for the brave stand he took there. But although I thought I knew a lot about it, there’s still more to learn and it bears repeating.
A documentary on the subject is presented at YouTube in three roughly-equal parts. It’s not at all pleasant to watch these three videos. It’s terrifying and/or anger-provoking. But after watching them you will understand a lot. One thing you will understand better is what’s happening now in America: that is, the far left campus’ indoctrination efforts to go mainstream. Instead of faculty and administrative capitulations and cooperation, we have local blue governments facilitating the whole thing.
Just a couple of years ago, had you watched these videos, you might have thought this merely an insane far leftist fringe cult that would stay on the far left. Now you know it’s a leftist fringe cult trying to take over the US, and getting pretty far in that endeavor at the moment.
I don’t think what happened under the Communists in China and Cambodia, just to take just two examples, was due to some extra-special characteristics of the Chinese or Cambodian people. It can happen here, because of the susceptibility of human beings to group pressure of this sort, if they lack a solid core of other values such as individualism, free speech, and inalienable rights grounded in something more than human say-so. Very few resist the pressure. Milgram knew it, and propagandists everywhere know it.
What are the students in these videos so angry about? They don’t really know. They know the words they’ve been taught to say about it, however, and they scream them out. Something is wrong in their lives, something very big (in the family? society? education?) and they’ve been given a grenade to throw. But they haven’t a clue why. You can see it in their faces, and hear it in their voices.
The anger, stemming from ignorance, a false sense of righteousness, and years of indoctrination (along with the fecklessness and the cowardice of the only possible opposition, i.e. the spineless GOP) calls to mind the lines from Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” In the words of Andrew Sullivan (hardly a conservative), “we all live on campus now.”
Ah, Evergreen. It had slipped from my consciousness although I was interested back in the day because my grand daughter used to play soccer against them in a league of mostly lily white private colleges in Oregon and Washington. I just reviewed the status and learned I had forgotten that Evergreen was actually a public school in Washington; but, not surprised to see that they are a self-described progressive public liberal arts and sciences college that offers a “non-traditional educational experience”. Students have the option to design their own degree. I leave it to the imagination to conjure a non-traditional science education.
Even in 2017 Evergreen was struggling as they were falling short of their state mandated enrollment. In the intervening years enrollment has plunged. and figures I see now indicate that they have lost another 25% of their studnet population. By the way, the disruptions in 2017 reportedly involved about 200 protestors out of an enrollment of 4,000. It is enlightening to see what a few can accomplish in the absence of official courage.
Somewhat surprisingly, the President during the 2017 upheaval is still President, and he has an MA in Criminology, and worked in the office of the U.S. Attorney General. The surprise is mitigated by learning that his PHD is in Sociology, and that his purview at the DOJ was treatment of minorities by law enforcement.
To be charitable, the parents who continue to send their children to Evergreen, or similar institutions, are clueless. In fairness, the slide that started in the ’60s has accelerated precipitously since parents with college aged students were in school.
Thanks for the heads up, Neo. I followed Evergreen and Professor Weinstein’s ordeal in a fair amount of depth, as it happened, but I’m sure there are details I am unaware of and plan to watch the three videos.
Interestingly, Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons” matriculated through Evergreen. Groening was rather prolific in underground newspapers in the ’70s and ’80s and I was a big fan of his work there (even own three of his books) years before “The Simpsons” made it to television. Interestingly, although I admire his work I have never seen an episode of “The Simpsons” although I believe I saw all the shorts he did for “The Tracy Ullman Show,” before “The Simpsons” got a half hour show of their own. I remember reading an interview of Groening in one of the underground newspapers he was syndicated in (probably the excellent, “Chicago Reader”) where he explained what Evergreen was like. I think he kind-of ended up there by accident, and even though he enjoyed it, he explained that it wasn’t really a school. There weren’t even grades. I think students were given appraisals, or colors, or something.
For years I have been struggling for a way to express a thought, but I can’t quite find the right words…
One thing that bothers me about what happened at Evergreen, and so much of the unrest now, and other absurdities I see in so many today:
There is a sort-of stolen valor component to it. It’s wrong for a lot of reasons, but it’s tremendous narcissism or egotism.
I’m not particularly fair-skinned. I’m sort of a duskier “white” person, but by standards of those who care about such things I’m “white.” George Washington was also “white.” Isaac Newton was “white.” Dr. Albert Schweitzer was “white.” Elon Musk is “white.”
I don’t ever wake up thinking I share any of the amazing traits of those people (beyond simple humanity). I haven’t cured any diseases, liberated a nation, founded a company launching men and women into space. I should not feel PERSONAL pride from anything any of those people have done. By the same, accurate, reasoning, no living 25 year old was a slave, or not allowed to sit at a lunch counter, or witnessed genocide of native Americans, or forced to be a Christian…
Just as it would be absurd for someone who has skin color similar to Michael Jordan’s to walk around like he personally won 6 NBA championships, and expect people to treat him as if he did; it would be absurd of me to act like I can win a Nobel prize for Physics because some middle-aged white guy did.
And, it would be equally absurd for me to walk around expecting people to feel sorry for me because Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent 29 years in labor camps in the Soviet Union. I did not suffer that cruelty. Alexander Solzhenitsyn did.
So many young people feel they have an innate privilege of victim (and the attendant empathy that goes with it) by proxy.
Mr. Firefly,
You have put into words what I have been trying to express to others with varying degrees of success.
Thank you.
IMO, the privileged youths should be offered an all expenses trip to Saudi Arabia for a one year education. Then get back to those of us in flyover country about the wonders of multiculturalism.
Rufus T Firefly:
From wcikedmedia: Life in Hell by Matt Groenning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_Hell
The Life In Hell strip ran in the Oregonian newspaper on Saturdays, which made the paper worth buying once a week.
Minor nit. It is “The Evergreen State College”. Washington is “The Evergreen State”.
Well said, R.T. Firefly.
Stolen Valor is an apt analogy.
Stolen Victimhood. Growth industry.
Rufus T. Firefly:
In the first video, Weinstein explains a little bit about what Evergreen was like prior to the uproar.
Yes, it is The Evergreen State College. Used to be referred to as TESC regularly but I don’t think they liked that too much. The really galling thing is it is a state university unlike Oberlin, Yale, or some of the other loony private institutions.
In a just world when King Jay and his minions realize the massive budget problems their shutdowns have caused they would cut all funding to this place and let them make a go of it as a private college but that is just a dream.
@ j e:
” . . . the fecklessness and the cowardice of the only possible opposition, . . . the spineless GOP”
Yes, but I would add another possible and shamefully absent opposition: liberal (that is, nonleftist) Democrats, who have allowed their party to be hijacked by totalitarian goons.
If the dividing line was ever between left wing and right wing, Republicans and Democrats, it is now between the liberal and the illiberal, moderates and extremists.
I was a radical leftist and a registered Democrat for many years. I have not been registered with any political party for the past decade and a half. But on November 3, I am going to do something I have never done before — vote a straight Republican ticket, top to bottom. And I’m probably not the only one.
I suppose I could do my own research, but maybe someone already knows: Is there an established academic theory on embodiedness? It’s as if there is some kind of anthropological or philosophical doctrine concerning the sociology of bodies that I should have heard about, but somehow missed.
“Black and brown bodies … you’re not respecting black and brown bodies.”
In the old days they would have said “person”. In older more dualistic days, they would have referred to “souls”, as in, “After the hull was breached, the ship quickly sank with the loss of all souls aboard”
Something – some view of reality and moral obligation – is implied by a reference to bodies of a particular kind deserving admiration or respect, apart from the souls within them or the persons manifested in them.
But I am not sure what, or how the logic works.
It seems somewhat like the obverse of the demand that one respect an expressed will or a want, minus any (probably teleological) theory of what makes an act of will, per se, worthy of respect.
Someone here probably has a link, which would be greatly appreciated. I’ve already waded through so much postmodern puke on my own, that my appetite for research is temporarily diminished.
I do have an email box full of article links to transgressing this or that, or on enlarging the boundaries of post-human sexuality something or other, that I have not had the stomach to read. Maybe I’ll find it there.
DNW:
I believe the “bodies” thing was popularized by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a popular writer on racial grievances. It’s a word he uses constantly, and so do others, although I don’t know if Coates was the first to use it that way. My guess is that he’s not the first, but that it comes from some critical racial studies theorists.
Please see this and also this.
The ‘brown bodies’ has become a thing recently also. I guess that is the replacement for Hispanic maybe. Who the hell knows at this point. So tiring.
I suppose I could do my own research, but maybe someone already knows: Is there an established academic theory on embodiedness? It’s as if there is some kind of anthropological or philosophical doctrine concerning the sociology of bodies that I should have heard about, but somehow missed.
“Black and brown bodies … you’re not respecting black and brown bodies.”
DNW: I first encountered the “black body” fetish in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s holy text:
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Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it
is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.
–Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me”
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Coates goes on and on about “breaking the black body.” His intention is to sledgehammer the reader with images of blacks beaten, whipped, lynched and otherwise assaulted, as though such horrors only occurred to blacks and according to a malign mission of all white Americans, whether they admit it or not.
I’d be curious to hear of earlier instances of “black body” literature.
DNW: a few years ago I started seeing “bodies” in leftist writing where “people” or something would be more usual. After the fifth or six time I thought “This is some noxious academic fad.” Which I’m sure it is, but I never bothered trying to track it down.
Given the American heritage of “breaking the the black body,” which Coates presents as an indisputable truth, Coates is oddly unable to document his claim convincingly with proofs from his own life.
As I recall, his three big examples were (1) his Black Panther father beating Coates as a child, obviously due to systemic white racism, (2) a black friend who died in a shoot-out with a black policeman — more systemic racism and (3) an obnoxious white woman in New York (imagine!) pushing Coates’s son on an escalator.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Why “bodies” instead of “people”? Because it is more personal, melodramatic and hectoring towards the people you are trying to intimidate with your rhetoric.
“I would add another possible and shamefully absent opposition: liberal (that is, nonleftist) Democrats, who have allowed their party to be hijacked by totalitarian goons.”
Molly, I voted Democrat most of my life. I quit in the early 2000s not only because I felt the Michael Moore wing had taken over the party but because it appeared to me that the “elders” who should have known better were letting it happen for political reasons. Soon after, moderate liberals like Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller – one of whom had been their VP candidate only shortly before – were drummed out of the party for not toeing the leftist line. If I am not mistaken I believe neo’s experience closely parallels my own.
Neo: Just a couple of years ago, had you watched these videos, you might have thought this merely an insane far leftist fringe cult that would stay on the far left.
for years i tried to tell you otherwise…
i really really did…
and failed..
Enough with the ANTI WHITE NARRATIVE
1,975,022 views •Jun 10, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88-dV9K_cHE
“ What are the students in these videos so angry about? They don’t really know.“
No, they don’t. I hope I can find time to watch these videos. But I don’t have to in order to have some sense of the emotions these students are riding. I recognize it because for a period in 1969-70 I felt some of the same things, and on at least two occasions behaved similarly. It’s a kind of madness, and I cringe when I think of it now.
@mac: “ I felt some of the same things, and on at least two occasions behaved similarly. It’s a kind of madness, and I cringe when I think of it now.”
Me too. My elders were extremely patient with me, God rest their souls.
The insidious progress of bigotry. Racism is a class of prejudice under diversitist (i.e. color judgments) thought and practice. That is judgments based on low information attributes (e.g. skin, sex), which is exacerbated in cultures with a Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, politically congruent religion.
Benjamin Boyce has been following the dumpster fire in Olympia, Evergreen State College for a few years now on YouTube. His latest is below, from May 2020.That was his 20th YouTube video about Evergreen and the alphabet racists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEZqbU83V2E
Bret Weinstein interviewed Benjamin Boyce in June 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd6S73Hcws4
King Jay of Inslee and his minions in Olympia seem to have no problem with whar has and is happening at Evergreen it seems.
This is a reprint of a 1948 newspaper series, and it is a blunt story of what real oppression consisted of. Read it on down to the first (and so far only) comment —
https://billsteigerwald.com/exposing-old-jim-crow-1948/
— because it looks to me like the goal of #BLM and Antifa is to take America BACK to 1948.
MollyG and Mac,
I somehow avoided knee jerk hatred of “the man,” or “the system” or whatever you want to call it, when I was in my formative years. I was prejudiced against “the rich,” but it was purely bottom line with me. However, many of my peers shared your opinions in their teens and twenties. My guess is it’s, “Daddy issues.” No offense towards him, but my father (whom I have a very good relationship with) would be the first to admit he was not a role model during my formative years, so it made it easy for me to not resent him. However, many of my friends who had fathers who were paragons of society went through a stage of revolt.
I sometimes wonder if evolution hasn’t programmed us to resent our parents when we are in our teens and twenties as an evolutionary advantage to spread our DNA among other tribes? It seems like the Hebrews codified this behavior thousands of years ago: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
Meemsie,
Thank you for your kind words. It’s comforting to know that others see the same thing, but I still don’t like the words I used to explain the phenomenon. I’m waiting for someone more clever than I (and they are legion) to express it more succinctly. I’ve heard the term, “Selma envy,” and that captures some of it. But that is more relevant to those who are LARP’ing (live action role playing, as in a video game) civil unrest in an attempt at relevance. There is another level, where people actually believe they are suffering vile indignities others have suffered due to a sharing of immutable characteristics.
This may not be the most relevant post for this comment, but DNW has commented here and it is somewhat related, so I’ll place this here in hopes he reads it.
Awhile back DNW came under some criticism from a commenter (or two?) who chastised him for blaming parents for not raising children who hold sound political opinions.
While I disagree with DNW a bit about the importance of politics in child-rearing, or my personal concern in how my children vote, as a father of four I do agree with DNW. As Harry Truman said, “the buck stops here.” The lovely Mrs. Firefly and I are responsible for rearing our children. Now, having been a parent for nearly 27 years I can share that it is a humbling experience. I now tend to look at it as “steering,” more than “rearing.” And, I want to be clear, I don’t think parents are responsible for all of their childrens’ behavior. I know many good families who put a lot of attention into raising their kids who have a kid who is troubled. DNA is tricky stuff. But DNW is correct. There is no one who has the potential for greater impact in a child’s development than her or his parents.
Tom Brokaw calls Americans born in the first half of the 20th century “The Greatest Generation.” I understand his point, but those same people reared the hippies and yippies and greedy, selfish baby boomers. The “Greatest Generations'” legacy, offspring-wise, is a mixed bag. And that matters. Unfortunately, I think my generation has done an even worse job, and we are living in the world created by our failures.
I think DNW gets it wrong when he focuses on offsprings’ voting patterns. Politics may or may not matter much to some folks. I’m not as concerned about whether my kids can quote Hayek or Sowell as I am that they respect freedom, individuality and take responsibility for their actions.
om,
“Life in Hell,” yes. Didn’t he also have a spin-off featuring Akbar and Jeff? The “Chicago Reader” was worth buying for more than Groening, but I think it was free.
I followed the Weinstein/Evergreen imbroglio closely at the time and feel no need to revisit it nor extend my knowledge. I possess a developed opinion.
Here is a note that may be a sign of hope. Tucker Carlson has the highest ratings EVER for an online cable news now and moreover is #1 with the youth demographic by a wide margin. Something to think about.
Rufus T. Firefly: Maybe no one is in charge. Parents can only do so much. Genes are at least half the story, probably more. Meanwhile, modern society, in which we all exist, wobbles along erratically in response to environment, historical events, random events, cultural events, the economy and technological development.
Maybe the glass is half-full and we do a remarkable job keeping things going more or less without careening totally out of control.
I’m fifty years older than these students. More than that. I haven’t understood their rage since so much of it is based on the most obviously false knowledge. But discussing facts is useless. Like shooting BBs at a bowling ball. We’ve gotten to the state where facts and logic are oppressive, tools of western imperialism, racist….
What is going on?
Maybe they are empty. Nothing against which to contend; crops, family budget, extended family needs, threats from weather, helping people in actual need…..
No way to feel valuable or useful. No way to test themselves, no way to learn and do and build self-esteem as competent and valuable individuals. Nothing for which to be legitimately praised.
Possibly related. Some teachers I know, having been around, prefer the far-burbs/farming demographics for high school, if they have to be some place.
I take the emphasis of “bodies” to be shorthand for the idea that any property crime is defensible, because the people with the property are vaguely complicit in some past or present threat or physical/medical damage to individuals. To defend property is wrong because Marxism, but rather than cite Marxism, it’s nicer to imply that all those Scrooge McDucks value their piles of jewelry over the health of the struggling person of color or victim of patriarchy or whatever. It also introduces a valuable notion of protecting privacy, dragging in the abortion debate, always helpful as long as you refuse to consider the body of the fetus.
Richard Aubrey,
I do think we are victims of our own success. As you write, we are built for struggle yet many young people have nothing sincere to struggle against. So they play act in a world where they are heroically struggling to save the planet, or a race of people. In a side note, I see many blacks mocking upperclass white kids who think “black lives” is their new summer internship project for building their grad school resume.
Well a few may find they get to struggle for ten years inside the federal pokey. Unexpected consequences. Some folks look good in orange. Orange will be the new bleak.
Rufus:I didn’t follow the Jeff and Akbar spin off: too far removed from the culture in Eastern WA?
huxley,
I agree that a lot of life on this big rock, hurtling through space is random, and kids come out of the womb with a lot of hard-wired programming. Also, much of the culture is in league against parents. But a mom and dad still have the opportunity to teach a great deal.
My wife and I have a net worth that is easily 1/3 of what it would have been had we focused more on ourselves and money, than our children. And I know many folks who flipped that calculus. There are choices and decisions along the way.
I am not bragging. Looking back I now see some key things I missed with my own children, things I saw other people get right. As I wrote, it’s tricky stuff. But the main reason we have so many young adults acting so foolishly now is a result of poor parenting.
My kids were/are friends with some kids who were home schooled. All of those kids are model citizens as they navigate young adulthood. That was a path that seemed too daunting to my wife and me. Yet I know families who made that sacrifice and their children are better for it.
We’re told that anti-black racism is a public health problem. Approximately 10 to 20 “unarmed” American blacks are killed by the police every year. About 3,200 blacks were lynched in the period between the Civil War and the late 1960s.
Over 33,000 Jews were killed in two days at Babi Yar.
If anti-black racism is a public health issue, what about Jew-hatred?
I do think we are victims of our own success. –RT Firefly
Richard Aubrey/Rufus T. Firefly: My grandparents (mother’s side) were classic Midwesterners with the typical values of the time — hard work, thrift and decency. They became quite successful from family inventions and a prescient interest in oil.
Their three children were all intelligent and attractive with seemingly bright futures ahead. However, the children (born 1926-1933) ended up hating their parents and leading blighted lives. The daughters committed suicide and the son blew the job opportunities his father handed him and ended up dropping out into the Haight-Ashbury then living the rest of his life in small Southwestern towns on a trust check. “Independently poor,” he called it.
For decades I tried to understand the family disaster. Was there some horrible family secret which had driven the second generation mad? I couldn’t find anything. I’ve concluded that it was just another chapter in “The Curse of the Nouveau Riche.”
Wealth has its own problems and not everyone can handle it, especially if they didn’t make the money themselves.
It could be argued that post-WWII America lived out the Curse of the Nouveau Riche on a national level.
Rufus et al., I think – regarding parenting – that we’re seeing an especially irresponsible and narcissistic variety now: children serving as props demonstrating their parents’ virtue. Children whose parents disrupt their peace of mind, even to the point of making the children sick (see for instance Greta Thunberg), in order to force-bloom a hothouse flower more beautiful than the one their neighbors have.
I never saw that execrable (I’m assuming, based on third-party reports) Honey Boo Boo thing, but I would be willing to bet that many who scoffed at it, who wagged their heads at the malignant narcissism of that child’s mother, have put protest signs in their children’s hands and led their children in front of them in marches against whatever they, the parents, have decided is the virtue flavor of the month. What’s worse – the parent who drives her children hard to learn a skill, playing the violin or some such, so that the parent will be able to preen and make careful self-deprecating remarks to friends – “Well, of course we had to push him to practice at first, you know, when he was four and we started the lessons, but now he does it himself because he just wants to excel.” – or the parent who stands, silent and very publicly grieving, behind her child at the podium as the child makes an impassioned and content-free speech to adults who have all agreed to the fiction that a child is an authority on anything?
The Evergreen disease claims new victims in the category of playing in traffic:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/2-people-hit-by-car-on-i-5-in-downtown-seattle-during-protest/
‘Hand wringing from an official spokesman to the effect ‘I can’t make the interstate safe for pedestrians.’ Protesters got acquainted with physics and a driver they didn’t want to know. Sad and stupid.
Well, good morning and happy Independence Day, to those who check in to this site and thread today.
I’m not leaving town until tomorrow so if I stop by the office for a few today, I’ll try to produce a response , to some remarks left by others, on a keyboard rather than this hateful tablet or an IPad.
But for now, and in re the matter of children’s political attitudes vis-a-vis their parents.
I recognize it is a potentially emotional issue, and I’ll reread my own remarks to try and be sure of my earlier framing and formulations, but …
What I recall being focused on, what interested me, was not so much the fact that the offspring described had differing political opinions, but the interpersonal vehemence with which those views were held, the dismissiveness with which they treated their parent’s views, and the potentially punitive consequences which the parents apparently feared might result from insisting on a hearing from their own offspring.
My intended point was not that parents were negligent in failing to indoctrinate their children into some form of repressive, lockstep conservativism. It was that a number of commenters had remarked upon the threat of loss they calculated would ensue should they insist on being heard out by their own offspring – who seemed highly disinclined to hear them out as if they were moral peers and fellow political stake holders with an equally respectable interest in the outcome of these affairs, and a perspective deserving of consideration.
Not to put too fine a point on it but they seemed to be describing something akin to emotional blackmail- should they insist on being heard as political peers by comfortable, well ensconsed children who had already decided the issue and would brook no contradiction. It looked like an unjustified subspecies of thinly disguised, if narrowly directed, contempt.
“Where’s the love? ” as the comedian might say.
This state of affairs made no sense to me as these commenters seemed respectable and accomplished people, temperate in their manner, and well reasoned in their comments.
As for why , more generally, a phase of emotional alienation of the young from the previous generations occurs, there have been lots of papers written on it from the anthropological and developmental psychology points of view. The extreme political alienation , and even hostility and contempt, is I think, related more to certain relatively localized sociological factors and conditions which work to make this path seem advantageous and status enhancing to certain individuals.
Apropos of Aubrey’s last paragraph above, the phenomneon does not take the same form, nor express the same virulence in all social groupings and cultures and living conditions.
There is probably some truth to it being in part an outgrowth of relative privilege and ease , and a hypersensitive and cliquishly developed mindset.
Perhaps then, It is no wonder that slogans featuring the words “privilege” and “inclusion ” feature so prominently in their speech.
Black bodies… makes me think of Rutherford and Planck. Where’s physicsguy? I used to have a biography of Planck lying around… it seems to have wandered off. But I think in either that or one of my other books, an early chapter discussed the discovery and significance of blackbody radiation in kick-starting the development of quantum mechanics and the eventual overthrow of classical physics. (I guess the textbooks call them ‘cavity radiators’ more often now.)
Aesop, that’s a fascinating link. I’ve taken in up to section 6 at the moment, in one sitting. Were it not for the fact that I have to go hang my flag outside, I’d continue.
Rufus, I appreciate your (hi)stories.
But a mom and dad still have the opportunity to teach a great deal.
Rufus T. Firefly: True. But I’m also thinking about the theory we evolved to survive with “good-enough” parents, because if children required perfect or near-perfect parents the species would have died out long ago.
To me there is a profound mystery at the heart of how people grow or don’t, parenting or no.
One thing I love about Christianity is that Jesus is the last chance for a lot of people to change and some, not many, make it work.
There was a kid in my neighborhood surfer gang, who I was sure would be dead by now. Not too bright, poor self-control, broken home, into drugs, petty theft, and public drunkenness. A few years ago I discovered he is alive, stable and well with a family. Just before he was about to go down the tubes he formed a relationship with a preacher, became born-again and set up a new life around that church.
The late, great futurist [Herman] Kahn used to ponder the question of free will with his audiences. “It’s a fundamental question,” he would say. “Do we have free will, or is everything determined? I don’t have an answer I’m sure of, but I am convinced that people behave better when they think they have free will. They take responsibility more, and they think about their choices more. So I believe in free will.”
https://www.wired.com/1995/10/wired-scenarios-two-questions-stewart-brand/
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That Herman Kahn quote has long impressed me and provided food for thought.
It’s true we don’t have perfect free will — unless we’re choosing our gender of course — but I’d say we’ve gone way overboard in emphasizing how we’re victims of one thing and another. It’s pure poison when you want to change or have to.
huxley: “It could be argued that post-WWII America lived out the Curse of the Nouveau Riche on a national level.”
Excellent insight.
MollyG: “My elders were extremely patient with me…”
Yeah, mine too.
Ok, I’ve checked on my earlier tablet post, and oddly for a tablet typed comment, I don’t see too much wrong with it either in format or content.
So, I guess I’ll leave it as my considered response … as I don’t feel like rereading everything I wrote about parents and their politically hostile kids, at the moment.
Now, as far as this new free will conversation goes, it’s pretty easy to sort out the question if the most extreme form of determinism is looked at in distinction to the more commonly understood notions of freewill.
The tricky part comes in when a kind of (roughly speaking) recursion cycle is entered into. Then it becomes, “Free of exactly what?”. Freedom from input from your own biological processes? Freedom from yourself as a self?
Ed Feser has frequently discussed the zombie problem as it relates to recognizing the existence of consciousness in another “person”. It’s somewhat analogous to the automaton problem as is relates to freedom of will. It is potentially difficult to recognize by external signs or behaviors alone. At what point are external influences, plus a preexisting nature (biology) said to constitute and irresistible force or inexorably predetermined outcome?
I see a bowl of potato chips, I pass them by, thinking that I want the admiration of my wife more than I do the trivial satisfaction of a snack. Am I exercising free will? Or was that choice predetermined? If after thinking it over, I decide instead to eat all the chips, was my behavior equally unfree? If I just stand there for an hour trying to decide, is that predetermined? If the answer is unfree in all cases, yet there is no logical impossibility with any of the outcomes, then there is a problem with the formulation of the question. … in my humble view.
If the summing of options, and the universe of responses are all calculated out beforehand and completely known, then everything is in some sense predetermined … But freedom is a comparative term, which includes freedom from coercion and from the exigencies of a life buffeted by impersonal forces.
The question then, in a universe of objective and preexisting objects, is just, a matter of, “freedom, from what”? It’s the only way either the concept, or a question including the term, makes sense. Much like the “liar’s paradox” problem”, where there is a missing referent or predication which passes unnoticed, and creates the puzzle. Or so I see it.
And on that note, happy Independence Day, as you celebrate your freedom, of will, and otherwise, today.
I have to go get some Nurf guns and firecrackers, and I have unfortunately no choice in the matter.
As we get older, we recognize this critical racial theory as a typical sort of linguistic vortex in a turbulent self referential word theater, that people have fallen into since writing began. It was in Darkness at Noon. it was in Godel, Escher and Bach. It was used by Franz Kafka. You see it used by couples who are nearly divorced. It’s all over the campuses. You see it whenever people are given the leisure to talk too much. The way to defend yourself is to demand repeated precise definitions every step of the way. “How far back in history do we have to apply equity correctives?” “Whites were enslaved too, by Islam.” “What percentage of African genes? Which genes?”
The singular defect in critical theory is that it could easily be applied to dozens of other identities and attributes of mankind, all of which are given to individuals unequally….so it becomes silly: “Critical Obesity Theory” “Critical IQ Theory” “Critical Attractiveness Theory” “Critical Height Theory” “Critical Athleticism Theory” “ Critical Religion Theory” “Critical Baldness Theory”….
Om,
“Protesters got acquainted with physics”.
Nothing worse than learning about F=MA the hard way. I was in the mountain climbing club in college and we joked that the fall doesn’t kill you, it’s the quick stop. In the case of getting hit by a car, it’s the quick start that kills you, a really bad case of blunt force trauma.
The original, unabridged version of our national charter, The Declaration of Independence
Two notable passages often overlooked:
he has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence:
and
he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
A nation conceived for “life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness”, born through reconciliation, and striving through prudent and bold action.
My kids were/are friends with some kids who were home schooled. All of those kids are model citizens as they navigate young adulthood.
Rufus T. Firefly: Your mileage may vary.
I know a woman, a fervent evangelical Christian and physician assistant, who home-schooled her sons. As soon as one turned 18, he got involved in a hare-brained to team up with a guy on the internet to do murder for hire. Law enforcement was on to them before they got off the ground.
He went before a judge, who was sympathetic and gave him the choice between doing time and joining the army. He joined the army, fought in Fallujah and came back whole, but bitter and screwed-up.
My white bodied, liberal, artsy female friends of a certain age are all suddenly exulting about ripping down Mt, Rushmore. It’s not just youth, it’s stupidity.
Surely it wouldn’t take much to get them to demand knocking down the Empire State Building— the architectural icon celebrates American enterprise, hopeful optimism and was financed by capitalist white men!
Ray:
I thought about posting some personal stories of “getting acquainted with physics’ when Neo posted about ‘Getting Acquainted With the Periodic Table’ but so far I have survived those lapses of judgement and inattention (working heavy construction as a much younger man). Looking back, the safety belts and lanyards we wore were actually more for recovery of bodies after an accident IMO.
The main reason I never pursued rock climbing was realizing that I don’t always pay enough attention to important essential details,
Other’s can choose to play social justice/anarchy games on the interstate. Why Kin Jay of Inslee and the Durkin is allowing this behavior to continue on I-5 is another question.
huxley,
I didn’t mean to imply that homeschooling is a cure-all. I meant that even if one lives on a school district that shovels nonsense into students’ noggins, there are work arounds. Of course, if a homeschooled kid has lousy teachers (aka “parents”) he or she may be better off in school.
Esther,
How do your enlightened friends propose to eliminate Mount Rushmore? It was dynamited regularly for 14 years to sculpt what is there now.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Even the best schooling (at home or elsewhere) and/or the best parenting is no guarantee of what a child will believe when grown. There are huge forces that come from many directions giving the opposite message.
I would guess that parents’ efforts make a difference in terms of overall statistics. But they are no guarantee; not even close.
We raise children and send them forth into the world. Even when they are young we only can control some things, and as they grow we control less and less, until we control nothing except that early input about values to which they may or may not still hold.
om,
The ‘white supremacist’ who drove into the protesters on the freeway in Seattle was apparently a black guy named Dawit Kelete who went to WSU and of course the protesters were a white woman and an Asian/Hispanic/Brown bodied? woman so he is a very stealthy white supremacist.
The allowing of the freeway to be blocked in the middle of downtown Seattle everyday for weeks is beyond ridiculous. Maybe they will block King Jay’s path to the airport for one of his flights to eastern Washington to lecture you guys about the virus and then they will crackdown on the protesters.
Esther:
I bet they object on artistic grounds, too. Those carvings are not exactly avant garde.
For that matter, I’ve never liked Mr. Rushmore. It’s always struck me as really really odd. But that has nothing to do with whether I think it should stay exactly as it is. I think it should, and my own artistic sensibilities are not at all relevant to the question.
I’ve known for a long time that a lot of people just follow the trends, and swallow what they hear on the news. But the past few years, and especially this year, have taught me that it’s even more people than I realized before.
Home schooling doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I have a friend that home schooled their kids but the son played on the local high school basketball and baseball teams and had many friends that went to regular school.
Too many people picture some kind of religious extremist family isolating their children when that is not the norm nor in my opinion is that a healthy way to raise a child.
Rufus T. Firefly: You’re a capital fellow and a careful thinker, so I didn’t think you were making a careless generalization. I was just reminded of a time when I saw home-schooling crash and burn.
I still wonder about it. I have great sympathy for the home-schooling movement, so I’d rather find the happy endings myself.
The mother is a bright, motivated woman and very Christian (perhaps too Christian, though judging that is happily not my job). She comes from a family almost as screwed-up as mine, so I sympathize with her as well.
I didn’t settle down and raise a family because I had no idea how to do it and feared I would do a terrible job of it, if I did. Perhaps I let my fears get the better of me.
Artfldgr:
Actually, I’ve been fighting that fight for over a decade and extremely alarmed at what’s happening in colleges. I never thought it couldn’t expand out into the larger world. On the contrary, I thought it would and I thought it already had.
The only disagreement you and I had on that score was that long ago you said the killing fields and/or the actual gulag would come here. I said perhaps, but I wasn’t convinced that would happen here, and I thought it more likely that it actually would be more like Venezuela. That was our argument.
However, I can point to several very old posts where I sound the alarm about behavior such as that at Evergreen. First, we have this post of mine from three years ago about Evergreen itself, where I write:
But go back even further, to July of 2015, and you will find this post called “what does the hard left have in mind for America?” You’ll see if you read it that I was highly concerned with what was going on and thought the left in America fully capable of violence if they thought it necessary, and also wrote this:
That was five full years ago, and it was all present, active, and obviously very dangerous. But I had also come to that conclusion much much earlier. In 2008, for example, I noted that Obama was showing signs of being on the hard left, not just the “soft” left. Also, I’ve written repeatedly for a long time of Allan Bloom’s warnings about the effects of leftist education in the US and what it has meant and will mean for the US in general. And back in 2005 I wrote a lot about what happened to Larry Summers, and what a bad sign it was about what was happening in the sciences.
In this post from 2014 I was already calling the SJWs at colleges the Red Guards. I was very serious, and I added:
I have been aware for many many years, even before I wrote that, but absolutely by the time I wrote that.
huxley, it (the home-schooled kid who didn’t turn out that great) is likely just an example of what neo implies, that it is impossible to perfectly control how someone turns out no matter what you do as a parent. It is hardly uncommon for two people with the same parents to turn out completely differently despite the same upbringing.
And it also applies to people with “bad” parents. While of course many people from dysfunctional homes grow into dysfunctional adults, some of them become just the opposite precisely because they want to avoid what they had to go through as a child. Of course none of this is meant to imply that parenting doesn’t make a difference but it is only one factor, and human beings are not robots but can be quite unpredictable.
human beings are not robots but can be quite unpredictable.
FOAF: Quite so. Given my background, much of my life has been about trying to understand how people become what they become and how they might become something different if they wished.
Parenting is difficult in part because it involves a whole ‘nother human being. But after you leave home (or even before) you have to start teaching and guiding yourself — in effect, parenting yourself.
You’re not dealing with another person, you’re dealing with yourself, which seems like it ought to be simpler, but as anyone who has tried to lose ten pounds knows, it’s not.
DNW on July 4, 2020 at 2:11 pm said:
“If the summing of options, and the universe of responses are all calculated out beforehand and completely known, then everything is in some sense predetermined … But freedom is a comparative term, which includes freedom from coercion and from the exigencies of a life buffeted by impersonal forces.” —
* * *
Perhaps we are the quantum particles in God’s science project.
The Bee always seems to have some post relevant to the conversation.
https://babylonbee.com/news/i-just-think-its-important-to-always-be-patient-with-your-children-says-childless-little-jerk
https://babylonbee.com/news/youre-already-enough-youre-perfect-just-the-way-you-are-shouts-lifeguard-steven-furtick-to-drowning-man
https://babylonbee.com/news/new-app-kidsalive-reminds-you-to-look-up-from-your-phone-to-check-if-your-kids-are-still-alive
My two cents on home-schooling, having friends ranging from the ones turning out brilliant young Christian conservatives, to those adding to the ranks of the uneducated always-poor (we never discussed their politics; it wasn’t that divisive 15 years ago, anyway): if your goal is to provide a better education than the schools (not a high bar) and restore the usually-censored moral foundation, you get Door Number One; if your goal is to side-step truant officers and reform school, you get Door Number Two.
(I will add that the second family actually had a number of laudable moral virtues, but education and legal punctiliousness were not among them.)
neo,
If my comments came across that I thought I was talented at parenting or had a lot of control over the choices my children make in life, then I was not clear. In an earlier post I wrote that prior to having children I thought it was 90% nurture, 10% nature. After having them I now think it’s 90% nature, 10% nurture. But I still try to do what I can with that 10%.
The thrust of my point is that DNW took some heat for blaming parents and was called out for not having children of his own, and therefore having a poorly formed opinion. As a parent I am defending his point (or what I think is his point {I don’t want to speak for him}).
I agree that my impact on my kids’ is limited and certainly more limited the older they get, but no, two people have a better read on them than my wife and I. When I have witnessed on of my kids going down an unwise path, or getting incorrect lessons from a teacher, or hanging out with a peer spouting nonsense, I tried to steer them to common sense, wisdom and virtue.
I am only speaking of responsibility. Parents have a responsibility to try. I feel personally responsible for any harm my kids do in the world (to an extant). If I don’t like the anti-liberty teachings at their school I need to attend PTA meetings, get on the school board, talk to their teachers and/ or read their textbooks and expose the to better texts. I was surreptitious about it, but when they were young I knew what books my kids were reading, movies they were watching, kids they were hanging out with.
However, they are still free, unique individuals who can (and should) choose their own paths. I try to ensure they know what is correct, but give them space to reach their own conclusions.
The left talks of re-education camps… if the win, they are a coming
and so with all the other stuff… its part and parcel
as with everything, they have softened us up on hyperbole and other things first so the eventual outcome would be less shocking if at all…
Below makes the references, that maybe you forgot Neo i tried hard to point out as more meaningful, like George Kennans long telegram… No, i was sure what was coming, and it isnt going to be Venezuela, because this isnt Venezuela, and this will not be ignored by the other two giants who have been working on this to be made in their image, not some feeble version as in south America.
The Making of the American Gulag
During the Cold War, the “police apparatus” was held up as a prime example of Soviet repression. Yet in its efforts to fight subversives, the United States ended up with its own carceral state.
http://bostonreview.net/war-security/stuart-schrader-making-american-gulag
Americans are too rowdy not to have the fearful systems in place to do control… funny. we already built them… or dont you remember my pointing them out Neo? or the Army document about how they are manned? remember? Civilian camps?
AR 210-35. Civilian Inmate Labor Program
The regulation, first drafted in 1997, underwent a “rapid act revision” in January 2005; it provides policy for the creation of labor programs and prison camps on Army installations. The labor would be provided by persons under the supervision of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Remember now? I was pointing it out way before 2008…
FM 3-39.40 Internment and Resettlement Operations
The above is from 2010… also Army…
FM 3-39.40 is an Army operations guide dated February 2010 with headings that include “Capture, Detention, and Initial Screening,” “Detainee Flow,” “Theater Internment Facility,” “Strategic Internment Facility,” “Detainee Rehabilitation Programs,” and much, much more. – Foreign Policy
The point of the american gulag article was that the police threw off the control of the political class.
are they now back under that historical control?
FM 3-39.40 is, essentially, a how-to guide for taking control of thousands or tens of thousands of people in a specific area, sorting them out afterward, and controlling them while in detention or in the midst of a resettlement.
For domestic extremists and radicals in search of evidence to support their forgone conclusion that the government is on the verge of declaring a police state, the field manual is a rhetorical gold mine — even if it didn’t specifically discuss how to apply these techniques to American citizens on U.S. soil.
Unfortunately, FM 3-39.40 discusses exactly that.
[but it was mostly intended for foreign lands not domestic]
Artfldgr: Takes me back to my leftie days in 80s when “Covert Action Bulletin” was explaining how some obscure, numbered directive would result in us all be relocated to camps in Utah!
It might have been true then. It might be true now. Who knows? Our betters have plans for lots of things.
My kids went to a good school system, by my assessment and by various metrics applied to systems in our three-county area. I’d have wanted more history–always want more history so maybe I’m not the one to listen to–and English comp. But, with the exception of a generally hung over math teacher in jr. hi. I didn’t have many complaints at all. My kids never had the flaky teachers I heard about from students and parents. Matter of luck, I suppose.
I had neither the motivation of seeing indoctrination or incompetence that might lead me to think about home schooling.
So far, the same is true of my grandkids. Their system is pretty fat in terms of resources and expectations. I haven’t seem much in the way of indoc, but the oldest is only going into seventh grade. We do talk about a few items from perspectives that the school might miss.
I’ve gotten through the first Evergreen YouTube and halfway through the second. It’s so cringey, it’s hard to watch. Must be my “white fragility.”
Evergreen wasn’t just the frog being slow-boiled, which I had assumed. The lurch towards “equity” or “anti-racism” came out of the new president’s strategy to roll the faculty and thereby ram through his ambitious plans to change Evergreen.
I can’t tell whether the president really cared about anti-racism or was an utterly cynical administrator all about the power. I lean towards the latter.
neo covered this in 2017. I guess I was playing hooky that day. Here are Weinstein’s words which neo qutoes:
______________________________________________
Things began to change at Evergreen in 2015, when the school hired a new president, George Bridges. His vision as an administrator involved reducing professorial autonomy, increasing the size of his administration, and breaking apart Evergreen’s full-time programs. But the faculty, which plays a central role in the college’s governance, would never have agreed to these changes. So Mr. Bridges tampered with the delicate balance between the sciences and humanities by, in effect, arming the postmoderns.
The particular mechanism was arcane, but it involved an Equity Council established in 2016. The council advanced a plan that few seem to have read, even now but that faculty were nonetheless told we must accept without discussion. It would shift the college “from a diversity agenda” to an “equity agenda” by, among other things, requiring an “equity justification” for every faculty hire.
–https://www.thenewneo.com/2017/05/31/the-radicalization-of-professor-weinstein-the-evergreen-backstory/
Things began to change at Evergreen in 2015,
The place has always been a collecting pool of screwballs. Had a boss who worked there some decades ago. She had stories.
The only way to fix Evergreen is to dissolve the corporation and dismiss the employees, and then to invite them back selectively. Welcome back the hourly employees and the salaried employees responsible for physical plant, accounting, treasury, registration, dietary services, purchasing; central receiving, posts, and transportation; medical care, information technology, and athletics. Tell the rest of them to pound sand. Set up committees of trustworthy scholars to hire a turn-key faculty.
The place has always been a collecting pool of screwballs
There are screwballs and weaponized screwballs. Guess which are worse.
Evergreen may not be fixed. Not surprisingly, its financial problems are mounting with the loss of out-of-state student enrollment (which pays more than in-state students) plus Covid. Evergreen is approaching a “cliff.”
________________________________________________
As Boyce explains, Evergreen has traditionally had an emergency fund which is refilled each year through summer school. But since the events of 2017 they have been drawing heavily on that fund. It has dropped from nearly $10 million dollars to around $5 million and is projected to continue to drop closer to $3 million by next year. At some point fairly soon, the emergency fund will be empty.
The administrator giving the financial part of the briefing concluded, “I can see that we can keep going like this for a year. We can keep going like this for two years. Sometime in the third year we are in a serious problem. We have come to call that the cliff.”
–https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/03/31/evergreen-state-college-facing-bankruptcy-soon/
Art Deco:
Those are all fine solutions to Evergreen State College, Your solutions might work if adults were in positions of authority in WA.
However King Jay of Inslee and the durkin of Seattle allowed pedestrian “protesters’ to shut down I-5 in downtown Seattle for 19 days without arresting anyone, They now have decided that it wasn’t good policy since they now have one dead and one seriously injured.
It is only unfortunate in their eyes that the driver is probably a young black man. They can’t run with or drive home the racism trope. Inconvenient, but she’s still dead, like the black dudes in CHOP/CHAZ.
https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/07/05/police-identify-man-who-hit-protesters-after-they-blocked-highway-in-seattle-one-has-now-died/
He appears to be a mutt. “Kalete” as far as I can tell is mitteleuropean – Czech or Polish. ‘Dawit’ would appear to be favored by some Ethiopian tribe.
Loose the “mutt.”
Some obvious questions below.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/07/05/cops-re-thinking-protest-rules-after-car-driven-by-black-man-kills-white-seattle-blm-freeway-blocker-n606394
Best quote IMO, Washington State Patrol (WSP):
“Not attacking the WSP with my comment, but this whole leadership fiasco in Seattle looks like a bunch of children learning not to touch a hot stove.”
Responsible adults are not in charge.
Responsible adults are not in charge.
om: Or, as Nick Danger noted, quoting the “I Ching”:
____________________________________________
Inferior people should not be employed.
–Firesign Theatre, “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger” @ 26:33
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGzve57kBlA
The second part of the Evergreen YouTube provides this wonderful kafkatrap:
__________________________________________
Brett Weinstein: Where is this white supremacy? Can we can we see it? Can we evaluate it?
And this faculty member said, “To ask students who are suffering from white supremacy to tell us about the instances of white supremacy…is racism.”
She said, “We must stop asking them because we are inflicting harm on them asking for evidence.”
She said, “To ask for evidence of racism is racism with a capital R.”
And as she said, “Racism with a capital R,” she leaned forward in her seat, and she looked directly at me.
__________________________________________
I’m glad to see that kakfkatrap tech is advancing beyond if you argue you are not a racist, you are a racist. It’s not a big advance, but you can tell they are trying.
1) Did you see a photo of the woman Kalete’s car struck? White, and tattooed all over. Probably a host of multiple STDs. Dancing on Interstate 5 in the dark of night. Give her a Darwin Award.
2) Evergreen College is simply a symptom of Washington State’s popular mental derangement. The entire state west of the mountains is utterly deranged; they’ve had too much money for too long. Play money for play-Marxists. This will now gradually change, even if Bill and Melinda hang on in their 44,000 square foot house (that’s one acre, under roof, for a family of four!)
My brother lives north of Seattle, and I have had to sever all ties with him due to his anti-capitalist, tree-hugging, anti-military, anti-cop, atheist, NYT-believing reflexes. Reflexes, by the way, occur neuro-anatomically below the brain…the brain never gets involved!
After the above interchange Weinstein asked to defend himself based on his record from the charge of racism.
He was told there would be a later time for him to defend himself.
Spoiler: There wasn’t!
huxley:
The trio of videos was chilling and evil, Benjamin Boyce has 20 YouTube videos that track that malignancy in Olympia. That the White Fragility fraudster is employed by the University of Washington is another tell.
“He was told there would be a later time for him to defend himself.”
Considering the frequency with which leftists: lie without qualm or shame; break promises and commitments (not to mention generally sound laws); commit acts of vitriolic hatred while claiming them necessary to usher in the Never-ending Summer of Love; discriminate against and oppress one group in order to protest discrimination and oppression of another group; enforce hive-mind orthodoxy in the name of freedom and liberty; and ignore or rewrite any historical fact that doesn’t promote their narrative and agenda — why does anyone believe them anymore?
“…if you argue you are not a racist, you are a racist…”
But of course. And…should you choose to remain silent when under the scrutiny—and worse—of the bully, you are also implicated!!
Win-win! No, you can’t escape “The Love”(TM). After all, it’s “White fragility” vs. “Woke agility”.
Indeed, it’s the old “stacked deck” trick…the goal being, clearly, to turn the entire Western world into a giant Room 101 (other corners of this good earth shouldn’t be alarmed, as they will be permitted to slaughter one another), or perhaps a Borg-like honeycomb of multitudinous Rooms 101—no doubt soon to be available for purchase at Ikea (easy assembly and life-time guarantee!)….
No, you can’t escape. And if one thinks that Donald of Orange in the WH will be of any help to ye….well, Joebama and the entire Unicornkorps will be more than willing to disabuse you of that notion. (And abuse you, as well…)
Barry – speaking of White Fragility — Matt Taibbi is burning down all his lefty bridges lately. I wonder when he will officially #WalkAway.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/505699-matt-taibbi-slams-bestseller-white-fragility-as-corporate-vision-on-racism