@St_Rev It is interesting when he says that Brown's actions don't sound like "something a human would do."
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S. O. Taurus
794 posts
S. O. Taurus
@shadesoftaurus
Turn at the next light.
Miami Katılım Aralık 2024
210 Takip Edilen44 Takipçiler
Note that Klein doesn't say *he* finds it hard to imagine. He says it *is* hard to imagine. He's not giving an honest account of his understanding. He's giving _instructions_ to his readers, telling them they already believe what he wants them to.
Helen Andrews@herandrews
@michaelbd My biggest “aha” moment in our post-2015 racial unrest was Ezra Klein’s piece calling Darren Wilson’s version of events “literally unbelievable.” Why would someone holding stolen goods mouth off to a cop? Implausible! It’s not “something a human would do”! vox.com/2014/11/25/728…
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@tszzl @upholdreality @petrmisan Hitchens was terrible though, a lot of the history he tells people is completely wrong. His rhetorical flair convinced a lot of midwits that he was a deep thinker, but there was no substance there.
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@upholdreality @petrmisan Your criticism of hitchens and dennett is just that they’re mortals lol
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The Four Horsemen of New Atheism: Hitchens drank himself to death, Dennett actually died, Harris became a Mossad podcast, and Dawkins is getting edged by a chatbot
Twenty years of telling us we were the stupid ones
Richard Dawkins@RichardDawkins
#comment-1031777" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-…
I spent three days trying to persuade myself that Claudia is not conscious. I failed. English
@herandrews What's odd is that Republican legislatures in red states are fine with their institutions being used to push far-left propaganda. There doesn't appear to be any interest in correcting the issue.
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“‘Leftists were always right in the past, but are wrong now’ is a hard thing to believe.”
This is the central problem. We need new books that totally reframe our history.
Academia today is structured to prevent such books from ever being written.
So where will they come from?
arctotherium@arctotherium42
The natural result of paying attention in school is to be an insane leftist. I had scrupulously politically neutral (and sometimes personally conservative) history/civics teachers, but "leftists were always right in the past, but are wrong now" is a hard thing to believe.
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@arctotherium42 Lot's of low hanging fruit is available - history of slavery in Africa (and how Europeans ended it), SE Asia after U.S. pullout (as well as the media support for Khmer Rouge), history of Weather Underground, anti-white massacres in the 60's and 70's, etc.
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@arctotherium42 You'd need sympathetic politicians, but (as you mentioned) Republican officials are uninterested/supportive of the propaganda in K-12/colleges, and voters are fine with it. Having a white history month shouldn't be a major ask.
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One way you could get around this is by teaching "Race War in High School" or "Danger in Washington", combined with basic science on how funding barely matters for school outcomes, to establish that opponents of the Civil Rights movement were sometimes right.
arctotherium@arctotherium42
The natural result of paying attention in school is to be an insane leftist. I had scrupulously politically neutral (and sometimes personally conservative) history/civics teachers, but "leftists were always right in the past, but are wrong now" is a hard thing to believe.
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@xwanyex Ezra Klein saying that Brown's actions weren't "something a human would do" is pretty telling.
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If I’ve seen this before, then I’d forgotten about it, but this is quite literally one of the most straightforwardly disqualifying pieces of writing from a political pundit I’ve ever read. Like, if this is your understanding of the world, then you are such a weird, sheltered, confused person that you should go sit in the mountains for the next 30 years reading about American society and trying to understand it. The idea that anybody who would write this would be employed as a writer and political thinker is completely insane.
Helen Andrews@herandrews
@michaelbd My biggest “aha” moment in our post-2015 racial unrest was Ezra Klein’s piece calling Darren Wilson’s version of events “literally unbelievable.” Why would someone holding stolen goods mouth off to a cop? Implausible! It’s not “something a human would do”! vox.com/2014/11/25/728…
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@xwanyex That's true. But next time they complain about affordable housing in the city they live, show them the extremely affordable housing that's available in some neighborhoods and tell it proves there's no affordability crisis.
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You have to understand that this is genuinely what even quite ordinary, mainstream liberals believe. Like, I’m talking about just the regular old people in my Facebook feed. They genuinely believe that suburbanites have completely invented the idea that there is a crime problem just because they’re mean, scared, racists.
And, meanwhile, rich suburbanites and rural hicks cause all the problems.
They really believe this stuff. Like, it’s not an exaggeration or a metaphor. That’s what they think is happening. They think that failing urban schools are because racist suburbanites don’t give those schools enough money. That’s their literal understanding of the world. They think that crime and disorder are overrated, but to the extent that these are real problems, it’s because of how we built the interstate highways 70 years ago. That’s their literal belief. They think that gun crime today is because it was hard to get mortgages in some neighborhoods in the 1960s. Again, this is their literal understanding of cause and effect.
You can get mad at Mathew Yglesias or Noah Smith or whoever else online, but understand that the average normie liberal lives on another planet altogether.
ᒪᗩᑎE@lanechanged
This ad spot accidentally captured the essence of how i see the conservative/Repub culture: just act all terrified of everything around you so they won't notice you're the predator.
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@politicalmath The Wiki page for the LA Riots only has one single picture of a rioter, which is this. It was added in the summer of 2020. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm…
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The manipulation of Wikipedia for meaningless partisan advantage is yet another example of why people have lost trust in supposedly neutral institutions
Cowboy Gospeler@CowboyGospeler
After folks laughed at AOC for not knowing vaquero history, I knew Wikipedia would alter their meaning to fit hers, so I took a screenshot, and they finally did rewrite it. Wiki removed vaquero from 'The origins of the vaquero tradition come from Spain...'
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The strange thing is the the New York Times no longer publishes the name of the article, but you can still see it in their archive from the original printed pape: timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1…
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3/3 On the verge of a Khmer Rouge victory, the New York Times published the article "Indochina without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." Months later its author, Sydney Schanberg, narrowly escaped being murdered by the Khmer Rouge. He would begrudgingly admit he had been wrong.
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1/3 At the time, most people said that cutting off American support to Cambodia would lead to the country falling to the Khmer Rouge. The New York Times from 1973, right after the bombing was cut off: nytimes.com/1973/08/19/arc…
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@sfliberty The NYTimes published an article saying that for most Cambodians, it would be a better life. x.com/shadesoftaurus…
S. O. Taurus@shadesoftaurus
1/3 At the time, most people said that cutting off American support to Cambodia would lead to the country falling to the Khmer Rouge. The New York Times from 1973, right after the bombing was cut off: nytimes.com/1973/08/19/arc…
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@sfliberty The Harvard Crimson backed the Khmer Rouge for years. The "peace movement" was successful in cutting off U.S. aid to the Lon Nol government, allowing the Khmer Rouge to win. x.com/shadesoftaurus…
S. O. Taurus@shadesoftaurus
1/4 The Harvard Crimson backed the Khmer Rouge for years, and openly advocated for the policies that would let them take power (and celebrating when they took over). thecrimson.com/article/1975/9…
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Noam Chomsky defended the Khmer Rouge while they were killing 25% of Cambodia's population.
He kept his position at MIT. His reputation kept growing. His books kept selling.
Thomas Sowell predicted this would happen. He explained exactly why it always does.🧵
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@PDS013033 @planefag @punishedBEATO That's when it became clear he had no idea what he was talking about. It's like someone claiming the Amish are "fully integrated." These groups might be fine, but they're definitely not integrated with the rest of society (many struggle to hold an English conversation.)
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@planefag @punishedBEATO You were on something of a roll, actually, until you chose to refer to Orthodox Jews as “fully integrated”.
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You can't really comprehend how staggeringly stupid the average antisemite is till you see them publish a 73 minute long documentary on how there are FISH in the OCEAN. Can't wait for his expose on Michigan: "there are GREEKS in GREEKTOWN!"
Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱@chadfelixg
If you can look at this and shrug off the idea there's anything anti-Jewish involved or motivating this, I simply do not trust your judgment.
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@realalexlains I'm somewhat sympathetic to these communities, but the parallel societies they create definitely cause issues worth discussing.
The fact so many reflexively try to shut down the discussion, smear people who talk about it, and claim there aren't any problems at all, is telling.
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I don’t see the issue with this.
As someone who lived in Jersey, near a town that has an influx of Hasidic Jews that bullies non-Jews in the area and commits financial fraud/abuse, it IS a problem and they need to be held accountable.
Laura Loomer@LauraLoomer
🤨🤨🤨 Do you all see what’s going on here?
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@HanShawnity @Schiavojer "they're everything we want America to be"
"It's true that they don't integrate"
So...what exactly is it that you want America to be?
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It's true that they don't integrate, and that's a different issue, but how do they drain the local funds? They don't use many of the taxpayer funded services including public schools and EMS which saves the taxpayer millions. Overall they contribute significantly more than they take.
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There is no "Jewish invasion" of New Jersey.
In fact, they're everything we want America to be.
They have strong family values, large families, strong communities, and countless volunteer organizations. They contribute to the economy, pay taxes, and violent crime is virtually non-existent.
We should strive to emulate them instead of maligning them.
We should find ways to take that model and replicate it on a national level.
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@camhigby I don't think these kinds of communities are much of a problem nationally, though they do cause issues locally.
But if these were Muslims/Somalis/etc. creating parallel societies and towns where English isn't spoken, almost all right-wingers would be outraged.
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Censoring people you disagree with only creates more people you disagree with.
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@QuetzalPhoenix I don't really care either way, but it's exhausting that the attacks are only against white people who merely suggest having some groups for ourselves, while numerous other races/ethnicities who currently do have groups for themselves get a pass.
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@QuetzalPhoenix Applying this to all types of ethnic solidarity? Or are we again only attacking whites who want ethnic solidarity, and ignoring other groups _currently_ having clubs/organizations/entire countries for themselves? "If white people act the way others do, it's a personal grudge."
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If your movement doesn't make room for "some of the good ones" then it isn't a movement, it is just a personal grudge being projected
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@Limb0_Man @elephant_ben This is a lie later invented by embarrassed anti-War folks who supported the Khmer Rouge at the time. Contemporary reporting said that American airpower was the only thing stopping the Khmer Rouge (and it broke the Khmer Rouge siege of Phnom Penh in 1973). x.com/shadesoftaurus…
S. O. Taurus@shadesoftaurus
1/4 The Harvard Crimson backed the Khmer Rouge for years, and openly advocated for the policies that would let them take power (and celebrating when they took over). thecrimson.com/article/1975/9…
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@elephant_ben I can't be fucked to check the timelines of LBJs presidency to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, but American bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia directly led to the Cambodian genocide, during which the Khmer Rouge remained the "legitimate" government in the wests eyes.
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The notion the Vietnam war is a genocide is not only wrong but so radically wrong, that makes me realize how bad leftwing histography really is.
mike@mike_slugs
Biden will go down as the first as tragedy then as farce version of LBJ. Briefly pushed off radical right wing reaction, passed some minor domestic reform, oversaw a genocide overseas which doomed his party’s chances and ushered in a status quo shattering right winger
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@elephant_ben The view of the Vietnam War in the American imagination is cartoonishly divorced from the truth. In reality, the anti-War movement getting the U.S. to pull out lead to genocides in Cambodia, Laos, brutal oppression of the South Vietnamese, and a massive refugee crisis.
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@avidseries NPR was always a bit crazy, but it was the kind of crazy considered normal in liberal circles. In '08, Terry Gross gave a friendly softball interview for terrorist Bill Ayers. She justifies his actions at times, and criticizes people who attacked him: x.com/shadesoftaurus…
S. O. Taurus@shadesoftaurus
NPR's Fresh Air doing a softball and laudatory interview with Bill Ayers, allowing him to lie, and even offering her own apologetics for his terrorism. She acts as if it was offensive and dangerous for McCain/Palin to criticize him during the campaign. npr.org/transcripts/97…
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