Drat: the NY Times has purchased Wordle

The New Neo Posted on by

Until a few days ago I’d never heard of Wordle. That shows you how far out of the loop I am, because it’s been popular online for a few months now.

A friend mentioned it to me a few days ago, and I tried it and liked it. One of its advantages is that you can only play one time a day, so that acts as a built-in check against obsessive time-wasting with the game.

But no sooner had I started than the Times seems intent to ruin things [emphasis added]:

The game was purchased by The New York Times Company in January 2022 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum, with plans to initially keep it free for all players.

How long will that initial period last? I have no intention of paying to subscribe to the Times in order to play Wordle.

However, I realized the very first time I played that this was just an internet and solitary version of an old old favorite of mine called Jotto. I played it as a child, and it is just about exactly the same except of course no computers were involved, and it was interactive with at least two people playing against each other.

And I think that difference is emblematic of the social and entertainment changes we’ve undergone since the 1950s, when Jotto first started and when I first began to play it. I probably stopped playing it in the early 60s, but I seem to recall that when my son was young we used to make up our own Jotto sheets and play it together as a family.

I had forgotten about Jotto until Wordle came along. But it was a fun game. If you played it for years, as I did, it will also help you with Wordle.

Speaking of which, here’s a method that supposedly would help you play Wordle even without accessing the Times.

Blacks cannot be racist, and whites cannot not be racist

The New Neo Posted on by

I think that’s how the narrative goes, right?

I seem to remember hearing as much way way back, many decades ago. Therefore I’m with Christopher Rufo when he tweets that “Whoopi Goldberg said on television what critical race theorists have been saying in print for years.”

Of course. Not everyone was paying attention to this twaddle, but it’s been out there attempting to warp minds for decades. There’s this summary of the train of thought, for example:

. Over the past twenty years or so, in American scholarship on racism, with ever growing intensity, it has become fashionable and even mainstream to assert that Jews are white, that is, that they belong to the dominant majority. This means, that as a collective, due to embedded racialized structures in society, they benefit from their dominant position and are complicit in oppression…

Critical Whiteness Studies have been promoted as an activist scholarship; according to its self-definition, its task is questioning, and de-essentializing whiteness. It seeks to question whiteness being the default color, as “neutral”, contrasted to people of color. The intention, according to Ruth Frankenberg, is to “displace the ‘unmarked marker’ status of whiteness, a continued inability to ‘color’ the seemingly transparent white positionings.” Even in previous critical analyses of racism, she claims, “whiteness remains unexamined—unqualified, essential, homogenous, seemingly self-fashioned, and apparently unmarked by history and practice” (Frankenberg 1997, p. 1).

It wasn’t enough to talk about black people’s oppression. White people – all of them, every single one – had to be demonized. And it couldn’t matter that some individual white people had even joined in the historic struggle against discrimination of blacks. They were oppressors too.

The root of much of this is the Marxist idea that people are marked solely by their membership in certain groups, that the individual actions don’t really matter to that designation because it’s all about groups, and that there is always an oppressor group (or groups) and always a victim group (or groups), and that the former are bad and the latter good no matter what they actually do, either as individuals or together. Nowadays instead of class those groups are racial for the most part, with all “whites” on one side and all “people of color” on another. There are hierarchies within each broad category, of course, and there are also some sexual categories (women in general, and gay or trans versus straight) as well. But race reigns supreme.

If the American people don’t buy this, too bad. It’s what Democrats wish to put into practice, both in thought and deed. Pick a SCOTUS justice for her fit into one – preferably two or more – of the preferred categories. Are too many “people of color” being arrested and put in prison? Change the laws so more are released. Are too many black children doing poorly in school? Blame evil “meritocracy.”

And on and on and on.

Back when I first heard about the first faint glimmerings of this sort of thing it wasn’t so very widespread. Now it’s the default position of most of the talking heads and all of the gazillions of people who have read (and taken to heart) those “anti-racism” books or taken courses in learning how white people should say continual mea culpas.

As has been pointed out many times before (after all, it is Groundhog Day), this has now leaped from academia to mainstream. And yet, somehow, so far Americans don’t think much of it when it’s put into practice:

Per ABC News: “Just over three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) want Biden to consider ‘all possible nominees.’ Just 23% want him to automatically follow through on his history-making commitment that the White House seems keen on seeing through.”…

The poll also found that no demographic – not even racial minorities or Democrats – want Biden to consider only black women for the vacancy.

I think that last sentence in the quote is especially important. Why is this being rejected? Perhaps it’s because most people still retain common sense. Or perhaps we can sum it up with that old thought: it’s profoundly un-American to make decisions on such a basis.

Here we go again: it’s Groundhog Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: What could be more appropriate on Groundhog Day than a repeat of an old essay about the movie? The film is a huge personal favorite of mine: very funny, mysterious, and touching. This essay has been slightly edited, of course, because in the spirit of the movie we try to get it better each time.]

In discussions of the film “Groundhog Day” on this blog, I’ve noticed a couple of people questioning why the Bill Murray character would find Andie McDowell’s Rita deserving of all those years of his devotion and energy. For example, “…[W]hat, exactly, made the lovely but, let’s face it, vapid Rita worthy of Phil’s centuries of effort?”

My answer is that he discovered love. Yes, Rita was beautiful, and a good human being with many excellent qualities. But of course she was imperfect, and over the years (centuries? millennia?) Phil no doubt had learned just about all of her flaws. Still, it didn’t matter to him because it wasn’t about Rita, exactly—it was about the fact that, somewhere along the long path of his transformation to wisdom, he finally understood that every person in town, including the ones he couldn’t tolerate at the beginning, was worthy of his attention—and of something one might call “love,” in its broadest sense.

And somewhere along the way to that knowledge, Phil’s efforts in “Groundhog Day” stopped being about getting into Rita’s pants or even getting her to love him, although that certainly took up a larger percentage of his time (and the movie’s length) than some of his other pursuits. But he probably spent at least as much time learning to play the piano (a form of love, too), or to carve ice sculptures, or to become skilled at some of the more mindless and meaningless tricks he mastered, or learning details about the life of almost everyone in town.

Was the old derelict, whose life Phil tried to save over and over and over, “worth it” either? Such questions no longer mattered to him, because the gesture and the effort were worth it, and every life was worth something to him.

Rita, of course, had always been physically attractive to Phil. But as the film (and time) wore on—and on—she became the object not just of eros, but of agape as well. By the end of the movie, I think that Phil had come to appreciate the idea of the theme and variations versus the symphony, which I wrote about here:

And, although walking repeatedly in the same place is very different from traveling around the world and walking in a new place every day, is it really so very much less varied? It depends on the eye and mind of the beholder; the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes.

And I submit that love is like that, too. Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse; plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety.

It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain’t necessarily so. Either of these experiences can be boring or fascinating, depending on what we bring to it: the first experience is a universe in depth, and the second a universe in breadth. But both can contain multitudes.

Towards the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT), Phil makes it clear that he has given up the pursuit of Rita entirely, and immersed himself in his love for her instead. Is this what finally frees him?

[NOTE: Here’s another essay on the film that’s worth reading.]

“Mostly peaceful” versus “non-violent dangers.”

The New Neo Posted on by

Orwell would take note of the Canadian left’s reaction to the trucker convoy:

You’ve heard of mostly peaceful violence and fiery but mostly peaceful protests.

Well, that’s how the leftwing propaganda fiction corporations describe violent thuggish gang-warfare assemblages they approve of.

But how do they describe completely, 100% orderly, violence-free protests they disapprove of?

They accuse those of creating “non-violent dangers.”

In other words, some people have been stirred to fearfulness by left-wing propaganda about the trucker convoy, even though that demonstration hasn’t just been mostly peaceful – it’s been totally peaceful so far.

[NOTE: See also this for a discussion of the US DOJ’s differential treatment of the BLM/Antifa protestors of 2020 versus the January 6th protestors.]

A class war has erupted in the US and many Western nations – but it’s not the one the left was traditionally expecting

The New Neo Posted on by

Then again, maybe the left did expect this. Maybe they changed their earlier expectations a while back. They certainly act as though they did. They gave up on the “little people” – the common man or woman, the middle class and even to some extent the lower middle class working people who care about their communities, many of whom are members of minority groups that traditionally vote for Democrats.

Maybe the Democrats figured no matter how far to the left they themselves moved, and no matter how much their policies trashed the lives of those people and those neighborhoods, minorities would still vote for them because they had fully bought the myth of the racist Republicans who would – as Joe Biden so memorably said back in 2012 – “put y’all back in chains.”

Maybe the Democrats were willing to lose the white working class because they felt they had a majority coalition of the rich white virtue-signaling liberals, the readers of the MSM (through which Democrats controlled that all-important “narrative” through which they felt they could create people’s reality), and large ethnic groups such as black people (poor or rich or in-between) and Hispanics. A combination of those groups would carry them through without the working class white people they despised anyway.

And so – among other things – the left angered the working class people who had to go to work in masks to keep the country functioning, while the leftist elites could work from home or flout their own rules. They ordered people to get vaccinated when some people were afraid or distrustful of vaccinations and the health agencies such as the CDC that had previously lied to them (and to all of us).

This isn’t just true in the US. It’s certainly true in Canada – as the truck convoy indicates. And it might be spreading (see this and this).

The left thought general strikes and demonstrations were things that they owned. How dare the right do this. How dare they!

[NOTE: See also this by Glenn Reynolds from 2019.]

Whoopi Goldberg, the Nazis, and those white Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

Let me start by asking whether anyone has accused Whoopi Goldberg of cultural appropriation regarding her stage name? Not only was her birth name Caryn Johnson, but her Jewish last name – and of course her silly first name – were adopted as jokes.

Let me add that I happen to think Goldberg was incredibly good in the movie “Ghost,” not just very funny but also very touching towards the end. And her early comedy routines, which I saw during the 80s in this one-woman show, were good. I don’t know what I’d think of the video now, but I certainly liked it then.

But these days Whoopi is primarily one of the members of “The View,” a talk show I don’t watch but which has an enormous and influential following. Every excerpt I’ve seen from it is either inane or actively offensive or both, and Whoopi is by no means the worst offender there. But recently she made headlines with some comments about the Holocaust that got her into a bit of trouble that I predict will blow over.

I don’t want this post to get unwieldy by focusing on Goldberg herself, so I’m not going to go into everything she said and what was wrong with it. You can take a look at Andrea Widburg’s discussion here for that.

The gist of Goldberg’s remarks was that the Holocaust wasn’t about race, it was about “man’s inhumanity to man,” and Jews are white so this was “white people doing it to white people.” In addition, she doesn’t seem to think there was anything unique about the Holocaust: “Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you are black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”

So according to Whoopi the Nazis, with their elaborate hierarchy of racial categories that involved the Germans at the pinnacle (as a race – in fact, the master race) were doing kind of like what Jews do to Italians and Italians do to Jews every day. Leaving aside how reductionist and profoundly ignorant that is, doesn’t the perspective of the Nazis themselves matter? Because that perspective was about as explicitly racist as they come:

In his speeches and writings, Hitler spread his beliefs in racial “purity” and in the superiority of the “Germanic race”—what he called an Aryan “master race.” He pronounced that his race must remain pure in order to one day take over the world. For Hitler, the ideal “Aryan” was blond, blue-eyed, and tall.

When Hitler and the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became the government ideology and were spread in publicly displayed posters, on the radio, in movies, in classrooms, and in newspapers. The Nazis began to put their ideology into practice with the support of German scientists who believed that the human race could be improved by limiting the reproduction of people considered “inferior.”

Later it was expanded into not just persecuting Jews, but killing them and wiping the entire group off the face of the earth based on their ethnic identity.

But the Jews were merely the lowest in the Nazis’ hierarchy, which made them the Nazis’ highest priority. The plans of the Nazis, once they conquered Europe, were to eliminate other groups in a stepped program according to national origins. Black people were not their concern for the simple reason that, at that time, Europe had very few black people (but gypsies were certainly among the Nazis’ targets). Whether you call these groups ethnic groups (most have distinct DNA profiles, by the way) or races does not matter. The point is that it mattered very very much to the Nazis, in fact it was of paramount importance.

Read about the Nazis’ Generalplan Ost to learn what the Nazis had in mind for their fellow white people in eastern Europe:

Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale to be undertaken in the European territories occupied by Germany during World War II. It would have included the extermination of most Slavic people in Europe. The plan, prepared in the years 1939–1942, was part of Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazi movement’s Lebensraum policy and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten (English: Drive towards the East) ideology of German expansion to the east, both of them part of the larger plan to establish the New Order…

The Generalplan Ost proposal offered various percentages of the conquered or colonized people who were targeted for removal and physical destruction; the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would become German. In ten years’ time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all East and West Slavs living behind the front lines of East-Central Europe…After the war, under the “Big Plan”, more people in Eastern Europe were to be affected. In their place up to 10 million Germans would be settled in an extended “living space” (Lebensraum). Because the number of Germans appeared to be insufficient to populate the vast territories of Central and Eastern Europe, the peoples judged to lie racially between the Germans and the Russians (Mittelschicht), namely, Latvians and even Czechs, were also supposed to be resettled there….

According to Nazi intentions, attempts at Germanization were to be undertaken only in the case of those foreign nationals in Central and Eastern Europe who could be considered a desirable element for the future Reich from the point of view of its racial theories. The Plan stipulated that there were to be different methods of treating particular nations and even particular groups within them. Attempts were even made to establish the basic criteria to be used in determining whether a given group lent itself to Germanization. These criteria were to be applied more liberally in the case of nations whose racial material (rassische Substanz) and level of cultural development made them more suitable than others for Germanization. The Plan considered that there were a large number of such elements among the Baltic states. Erhard Wetzel felt that thought should be given to a possible Germanization of the whole of the Estonian nation and a sizable proportion of the Latvians. On the other hand, the Lithuanians seemed less desirable since “they contained too great an admixture of Slav blood.” Himmler’s view was that “almost the whole of the Lithuanian nation would have to be deported to the East”. Himmler is described to even have had a positive attitude towards germanizing the populations of Alsace-Lorraine, border areas of Slovenia (Upper Carniola and Southern Styria) and Bohemia-Moravia, but not Lithuania, claiming its population to be of “inferior race”.

The Nazis were absolutely obsessed with race, and they divided white people up into many different races.

But it was the Jews who were marked for utter elimination, and this was so important to the Nazis that – unlike with Generalplan Ost – it couldn’t wait till the war was over. It had to done at the same time, and resources were diverted to that endeavor. What’s more, it came rather close to succeeding in making Europe Judenfrei.

So in that sense the Jews were not planned to be utterly unique in terms of being destroyed, just the first and the most urgently and thoroughly destroyed.

But ultimately what Whoopi Goldberg was talking about involves today, as well, and it has to do with “whiteness.” I wrote a post on the subject in October of 2020 entitled, “The new whiteness of the Jews.” In it, I said:

Jews can be all things to all Jew-haters: outsider “people of color” when necessary, insider privileged whites when necessary. But the common denominator in these categorizations is that the hate against them does not die. It just takes on different guises. And of course, Farrakhan has always been a spreader of the poison.

I also quoted this:

On October 17th, the New York Times published an op-ed celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Million Man March that neglected to mention the anti-Semitic history of its organizer, Louis Farrakhan. In response, former Times editorial board member Bari Weiss tweeted that the institution had adopted “a worldview in which Jew hate does not count.” The author of the Times op-ed, Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, replied that “ppl who have become white”—that is, Jews like Weiss—“should not be lecturing Black ppl about oppression.”

“People who have become white, says Howard University professor Hopkinon. This toxic drivel is part of what is taught to young people today, and just because it’s drivel doesn’t mean it’s not toxic.

[NOTE: Here’s a post I wrote in 2005 on whether the Holocaust was unique.]

[ADDENDUM: I now see that someone else has mentioned cultural appropriation by Whoopi.]

A college-age changer mugged by the reality of COVID restrictions and the narrowness of “liberal” schools

The New Neo Posted on by

This change story is worth reading. Like so many, it’s not really about someone who changed his or her mind in terms of the basics. It’s about someone who realized that those basic principles couldn’t be found where he or she had thought they were.

A few excerpts:

Those two semesters at home hadn’t been kind to me. I didn’t really keep in touch with my Bryn Mawr friends; gazing at their mansions through a glitchy Zoom made me feel like an outsider. When we did talk, they obsessed over how scared they were of the virus and how many precautions they were taking, as though it was some kind of competition. Instead of sharing my thoughts and experiences, I stayed silent because I feared their criticism and eventually dropped off…

The stakes of leaving were high. I had to walk away from my $75,000 scholarship, my friends—everything. After a few weeks of being overcome with uncertainty, I started looking for schools that were more aligned with my values.

I quickly discovered that almost every school that was operating even remotely normally was overtly religious. That was really hard for me to wrap my brain around given I had a somewhat fixed view of conservatives being rigid and intolerant. Yet, here I was, confronted with the fact that these religious institutions were, in practice, far more aligned with my values like individual liberty, critical inquiry, and diversity of thought than the place that explicitly claimed to be those things…

[Now at Hillsdale] I went to office hours—in person—the other day for one of my new classes, a required course about classic literature and I got into an interesting debate with a professor. Upon sharing an idea that directly refuted his interpretation of a line from Genesis, which I had never read before, he said, “That’s a great point. Why didn’t you share that in class?” “I didn’t want to be argumentative,” I told him. “Be argumentative,” he said emphatically.

Diversity and Biden’s SCOTUS nominee pledge

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden pledged that his first nominee to SCOTUS would be a black woman. He did exactly the same with his vice president spot, and see how that’s turned out. Kamala Harris’ performance as Veep has been so abysmal that it’s set back the cause of black women, if anything.

And if I were a black man I’d be spitting angry. What are they, chopped liver? How many black men have there ever been on the Court? I count two: pioneer Thurgood Marshall and reviled-by-the-left Clarence Thomas (who doesn’t even count as black in the left’s playbook because he’s conservative). Ah, but Joe wants firsts.

By the way, Scalia was the first person of Italian descent on the Court. Alito is the second. And lest you think that people of Italian ethnicity haven’t been long-term victims of discrimination, think again.

Or what about that grab-bag combination category, Asians? That would be a first. Hispanics already have Sotomayor (Cardozo didn’t count, being Jewish-Spanish). There have been no Slavs whatsoever, either – I hereby suggest Rod Blagojevich, of Serbian and Bosnian ancestry, and he’s a lawyer as well.

And speaking of diversity, nineteen states have never produced a SCOTUS justice. One of them is Delaware, and so I hereby propose that Biden appoint himself (he moved there at the age of ten, anyway, and has been based there). He did go to law school, didn’t he?

But alas, whatever Joe Biden identifies as, it’s not a black woman. And so he’s about to fulfill the pledge that actually seems to have gotten him elected:

At President Joe Biden’s lowest moment in the 2020 campaign, South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn came to him with a suggestion: He should pledge to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

After some cajoling, Biden made the promise at a Democratic debate, a move Clyburn credits with turning out the Black support that helped Biden score a resounding victory in the South Carolina primary and ultimately win the White House.

I actually think that although Clyburn’s support was indeed a major turning point, it was also a reflection of a turning point that had already occurred within the Democratic hierarchy, whose members realized with panic that the less-electable Bernie Sanders might just win the nomination, and that everyone needed to back off so pretend-moderate Joe could make it. I believe Clyburn’s support was a step – probably the first step – in the execution of that plan.

All of that is secondary to the question of what this sort of pledge means. An approach that designates and narrows the possibilities leads almost inevitably to the perception that the person is less qualified and was only chosen because of his/her group identity. That’s not good. It’s not necessarily true, either, but it’s a perception that is unavoidable.

But actually, these days the Court is so political that – except for “swing” justices – members of the Court are overwhelmingly defined by their politics and judicial philosophies, irrespective of race. In other words, I suspect that any Joe Biden pick of any ethnicity would vote just like any other. The rest is optics.

Those Spotify would-be censors, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and whoever else has joined their cause have the right to threaten to leave Spotify if the platform doesn’t boycott Joe Rogan. But they would serve their cause better if they just state clearly what bothers them about Rogan or his guests, and then try to prove it wrong by arguing against it and marshaling some facts to prove their thesis.

Ah, but they’re musicians, see, and what’s more they’re famous ones. A lot of people are joking about how their time is long past and much of the Spotify listening public hasn’t a clue who they are. There’s no doubt their time in the sun has gone by. But their music is still better than almost everything new that’s more popular on today’s streaming platforms.

That’s my opinion; make of it what you will. “Heart of Gold” and “Both Sides Now” are great songs, whatever the present-day political idiocies or even self-righteously tyrannical dreams of their creators.

I’m used to ignoring, or at least getting past, the politics of artists whose work I admire. It helps in the case of Joni Mitchell or Neil Young that listening to them doesn’t automatically involve buying anything. YouTube’s free, for example – although, like everything else, listening on that platform has its political problems for me as well.

Commenter “SHIREHOME” asked this question:

Wouldn’t you think that musicians that are “passed it” (classical reference) would like that Rogan is bring[ing] listener[s] to the music?

My answer is that it’s my hunch that both Young and Mitchell think that in the Venn diagram of “Young fans,” “Mitchell fans,” and “good people,” there’s a huge amount of overlap – and that in the Venn diagram that adds “Rogan listeners” to the mix, the “Rogan listener” circle is way off somewhere – overlapping greatly with a “bad people” circle.

Young and Mitchell also most likely thought their threat would work, and that Spotify would choose them over Rogan. So far, it hasn’t. But I’m not sure how much they care. They can now wrap themselves in a mantle of sanctity with the people they believe constitute almost all of their fans, and certainly all of their virtuous fans. How many fans do they need, at this point?

[NOTE: I will add that so far, Spotify was initially hurt financially in terms of the value of its stock (which had been falling somewhat even before Young’s announcement), but it seems to have recovered to its pre-announcement levels. At least, that’s how I read this graph. From what I gather, Young made his announcement last Monday.]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s Rogan’s reply. And here’s Spotify’s statement. Seems to me that Young and Mitchell were at least partially successful in achieving their goals in terms of policy.]