URLs du Jour

2020-07-01

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

  • Our Amazon Product du Jour is yet another book pushed by the Church of Holy Wokeness. (The University Near Here, for example, plugs it here and here.) A New Yorker review by Kelefa Sanneh attempts to make sense out of it (and also White Fragility, which we looked at a couple days ago): The Fight to Redefine Racism.

    Sixteen years ago, in 2003, the student newspaper at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black institution in Tallahassee, published a lively column about white people. “I don’t hate whites,” the author, a senior named Ibram Rogers, wrote. “How can you hate a group of people for being who they are?” He explained that “Europeans” had been “socialized to be aggressive people,” and “raised to be racist.” His theory was that white people were fending off racial extinction, using “psychological brainwashing” and “the AIDS virus.” Perhaps the most incendiary line appeared at the end, after the author’s byline and e-mail address: “Ibram Rogers’ column will appear every Wednesday.”

    Well, that didn't work out. Later, after a name change from "Rogers" to "Kendi":

    In the thirteen years since his abortive college-newspaper column, Kendi had become ever more convinced that racism, not race, was the central force in American history, and so he reached back to 1635 to show how malleable racism could be. The preachers who justified slavery used racist arguments, he wrote, but so did many of the abolitionists—the ubiquity of racism meant that no one was immune to its seductive power, including black people. In his view, the pioneering black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was propping up racist ideas in 1897, when he condemned “the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes.” So, too, was Barack Obama, when, as a Presidential candidate in 2008, he decried “the erosion of black families.” Although Obama noted that this erosion was partly due to “a lack of economic opportunity,” he also made an appeal to black self-reliance, saying that members of the African-American community needed to face “our own complicity in our condition.” Kendi saw statements like these as reflections of a persistent but delusional idea that something is wrong with black people. The only thing wrong, he maintained, was racism, and the country’s failure to confront and defeat it.

    If Du Bois and Obama are considered racists, then we got a problem.

    The problem with "redefining racism" is (at least) twofold:

    1. It's not as if the term hadn't been already been pounded into vague meaninglessness. People wanted to maintain its (deserved) opprobrium while (um) broadening to encompass … well, whatever was found problematic. To the point it became what Orwell said about the term "fascism": it "has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’."
    2. And if you "redefine racism", we're gonna need a new word for "invidious stereotyping based on skin color".

    So I can't recommend that you buy Kendi's book, but if you do, I'd be happy if you used the link.


  • P. J. O'Rourke writes at American Consequences: Killing time, part II. What's Peej been up to?

    So I still have a lot of time on my hands. One thing I’ve been doing is reading books, in particular books about people who had it worse than we’re having it… (spoiler alert!)

    • Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death – Everybody dies at the end.
    • Nevil Shute’s On the Beach – Everybody dies at the end.
    • Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle – Everybody dies at the end.
    • The Book of Revelation in the Bible – Everybody dies in the end unless they’ve been very, very good. And we haven’t.

    I’ve let my wife cajole me into doing yoga. To make this less embarrassing – and because my “Mountain Pose” was more like a “Molehill Pose” – I’ve been renaming the yoga poses. So far, I’ve changed “Cobra Pose” to “Run Over by a Car Pose,” “Child’s Pose” to “Peevish Brat Pose,” “Warrior Pose” to “Teargassed Fleeing Protestor Pose,” “Corpse Pose” to “Snoring on the Yoga Mat Pose,” and let’s not even go there with “Downward Doggy-Style Pose.”

    You'll also want to check his suggestions for moderating one's alcohol consumption: "gag-a-cat cocktails".


  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)
    Quillette is still a free-speech zone, so Michael Shellenberger found an outlet for his mea culpa: On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare. Let's skip down to his list of "facts few people know":

    • Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

    • The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

    • Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

    • Fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003

    • The amount of land we use for meat—humankind’s biggest use of land—has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

    • The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

    • Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

    • The Netherlands became rich, not poor while adapting to life below sea level

    • We produce 25 percent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

    • Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

    • Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

    • Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

    Interesting note: Forbes apparently published Shellenberger's article on their website, then yanked it. Et tu, Forbes?

    Shellenberger has a book out, Amazon link up there on the right, it's on my get-at-library list.


  • A bold suggestion from David Harsanyi at National Review (NRPLUS, sorry): Honor Warren G. Harding over Woodrow Wilson

    Princeton University has announced that it plans to remove the name of former president Woodrow Wilson from its public policy school because of his segregationist views. Other institutions with Wilson’s name will likely be pressured to follow suit.

    Good riddance, Woodrow. Wilson was one of the most despicable characters in 20th-century American politics: a national embarrassment. The Virginian didn’t merely hold racist “views;” he re-segregated the federal civil service. He didn’t merely involve the United States in a disastrous war in Europe after promising not to do so; he threw political opponents and anti-war activists into prison. Wilson, the first president to show open contempt for the Constitution and the Founding, was a vainglorious man unworthy of honor.

    Fortunately, we have the perfect replacement for Wilson: Warren Harding, the most underappreciated president in American history, a joyful champion of civil rights and republicanism. Harding deserves to be reinserted into the nation’s consciousness on the merits of his presidency alone. But considering that he also negated much of Wilson’s calamitous legacy, we have an even better reason to honor him.

    Harding was imperfect, but does not deserve the bad rap he received from history.


  • And our Google LFOD alert, rang for a recent op-ed from Rabbi Brad Bloom of Hilton Head Island, published in the Island Packet: Beaufort County leaders have moral, faith-based duty to protect public today. He relates a traumatic experience:

    I recently saw a car from New Hampshire with the state’s motto “Live Free or Die.” Frankly I took a step back for a second and felt a chill down my back just gazing at that plate.

    Unfortunately, the chill Rabbi Bloom felt was not a favorable reaction to a saying in favor of sweet freedom, but instead the dread worry that people deluded by such libertarian slogans might not adequately mask up.

    Hilton Head is in South Carolina, whose motto is "Dum Spero Spiro", meaning 'While I breathe, I hope'. ("And when I don't breathe, it's probably because I died from Covid-19, thanks to some unmasked LFOD guy.")

    On June 29, South Carolina reported 1324 new cases of Covid-19.

    In comparison, New Hampshire—which is full of LFOD plates, Rabbi—reported 13 new cases.


Last Modified 2024-01-23 5:07 AM EDT