Does Nikole Hannah-Jones Channel Ronald McDonald Or Pennywise?

wsws |  The wealth and privilege of the leading proponents of racialism demonstrate the reactionary character of identity politics. It is entirely divorced from the real concerns and experiences of the working class. Fearful of a unified workers’ movement, the ruling class seeks to sow artificial racial divisions among workers through the promotion of identity politics. Additionally, middle class layers seeking a bigger slice of the pie see identity as a means of advancing their own wealth and social position.

The American ruling class is terrified of the growth of a working-class movement. The fight against police violence, racism, and poverty can only be waged through the building of a socialist movement, independent of the capitalist parties, that unifies workers on their common class interests.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of the Times’s “1619 Project,” was paid $25,000 for an online Zoom lecture given to the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

Through a Freedom of Information request, the right-wing news outlet Campus Reform obtained documentation detailing Hannah-Jones’s terms of compensation for the February 19 lecture. Additionally, the documents revealed that Hannah-Jones was partnered with the Lavin Agency, a talent agency that is “the world’s largest intellectual talent agency, representing leading thinkers for speaking engagements personal appearances, consulting, and endorsements,” according to its website. Hannah-Jones’s relationship with the agency suggests she regularly schedules events and is paid for them.

Part of the agreement between Hannah-Jones and the University of Oregon dictated that the lecture, titled “1619 and the Legacy That Built a Nation,” could not be recorded and redistributed. However, a promotional flyer advertised a discussion on “the lasting legacy of Black enslavement on the nation—specifically, how Black Americans pushed for the democracy we have today.”

News of the lecture came days after Hulu announced that it partnered with production studio Lionsgate and billionaire Oprah Winfrey to create a docuseries based on the 1619 Project. In a statement, Hulu said the project was a “landmark undertaking…of the brutal racism that endures in so many aspects of American life today.”

Patrisse Khan-Cullors "Works" As Corporate Woke Makeup - Why Surprised She Lives That Way Too?

jonathanturley |   We recently discussed the move by Twitter to block the tweet of sports journalist Jason Whitlock criticizing the BLM co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors for purchasing a $1.4 million home in a secluded area of Los Angeles.  A self-professed Marxist, Cullors has reportedly purchased four homes worth more than $3 million and has looked at real estate investments in places like the Bahamas.  As with the censoring of a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter was criticized for the censoring of the story and later said it was a mistake. Now, Facebook has reportedly blocked the underlying New York Post report about the controversy.  In the meantime, BLM itself insists that the controversy is little more than terrorism from white supremacists.

Various conservative sites reported this week that Facebook users could not share the link to a story that shed light on Cullors’ multi-million-dollar splurge on homes. Fox News reported that “an error message appears whenever users try sharing the article on their personal Facebook page or through the Messenger app.”

Cullors has not denied the purchase or the real estate investments, including in her statement below to the controversy. The story was widely circulated because Cullors has long insisted that she and her BLM co-founder “are trained Marxists. We are super versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”  She has denounced capitalism as worse than Covid-19.

Critics like Nick Arama of RedState pointed out: “[I]t’s interesting to note that the demographics of the area are only about 1.4% black people there. So not exactly living up to her creed there.”

Moreover, the head of New York City’s Black Lives Matter chapter called for an independent investigation into the organization’s finances in the wake of the controversy.

The New York Post and other publications reported that Cullors is eyeing expensive properties in other locations, including the Bahamas.  However, I noted earlier that there is no evidence that this money came from BLM, which has reportedly raised almost $100 million in donations from corporations and other sources. Indeed, Cullors seems to have ample sources of funds. She published a best selling memoir of her life and then a follow up book.  She also signed a lucrative deal with Warner Bros to develop and produce original programming across all platforms, including broadcast, cable and streaming. She has also been featured in various magazines like her recent collaboration with Jane Fonda.

Vindictive "Morality" Is The Unenforceable Quintessence Of Woke-ism

theapeiron  |  Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Robert Aaron Long was trying to purge himself of his sex addiction by murdering women at spas and massage parlors. According to police, these spas were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Apparently, it never occurred to Long to see a therapist, or pick up a self-help book. Nope, his first thought was to go out and buy a handgun, and then go on a shooting spree. That’s what our dominant culture still teaches men, to solve their problems by punishing women. Long is just an extreme example of the violence we witness every day.

Maybe you don’t see much in common between a deadbeat dad and a mass shooter. I assure you, they have everything in common. They both practice vindictive morality. It’s a problem, especially for women — or anyone who can be turned into a scapegoat.

I’ll explain.

Genuine morality involves a deep, sincere sense of personal responsibility for your own actions. You follow the core western monotheistic principle of judging yourself before judging everyone else. You hold yourself to a higher standard. You focus on staying consistent with your own beliefs. You practice self-awareness and reflection, and you always try to understand how your actions affect those around you.

Sounds great, right?

In other words, you try to mind your own business. You don’t concern yourself with what other people might be doing, unless it presents an immediate threat to you or someone you care about.

Vindictive morality goes against all of that. You see it a lot in the Westboro Baptist types. They assume they’re inherently right, and morally superior to everyone else. They’re pure.

The only way they could possibly do something wrong is if an outside influence corrupts their immortal soul. Of course, this is always happening in their mind. They’re in an endless war against sin.

Vindictive morality is a way of not taking responsibility for your own actions. It’s a way of attributing any bad thoughts you might have to some external source, thus maintaining the illusion that you’re truly an innocent little kid at heart, incapable of malice. If they wind up hurting someone, then it’s always someone else’s fault.

It’s one of the oldest stories in the book. And that book is the bible.

Canceling Is A Feminine Strategy For Playing Musical Chairs On The Deck Of The Titanic

greenwald  |  A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.

I’ve written before about one particularly toxic strain of this authoritarian “reporting.”

This is a point I've made over & over again: "go woke, go broke" has it exactly backwards. The revenue crunch is the /cause/ of the ideological monoculture, purity tests, & witch hunts -- not the reverse.

Fix the revenue model, & you fix the newsroom culture. https://t.co/z1sEYLAxII

— jonstokes.com (@jonst0kes) February 7, 2021

Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s “media reporters” (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s “disinformation space unit” (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention). These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.

Just as the NSA is obsessed with ensuring there be no place on earth where humans can communicate free of their spying eyes and ears, these journalistic hall monitors cannot abide the idea that there can be any place on the internet where people are free to speak in ways they do not approve. Like some creepy informant for a state security apparatus, they spend their days trolling the depths of chat rooms and 4Chan bulletin boards and sub-Reddit threads and private communications apps to find anyone — influential or obscure — who is saying something they believe should be forbidden, and then use the corporate megaphones they did not build and could not have built but have been handed in order to silence and destroy anyone who dissents from the orthodoxies of their corporate managers or challenges their information hegemony.

"Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism," complained Ultimate Establishment Journalism Maven Steve Coll, the Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a Staff Writer at The New Yorker. A New Yorker and Vox contributor who runs a major journalistic listserv appropriately called “Study Hall,” Kyle Chayka, has already begun shaming Substack for hosting writers he regards as unacceptable (Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss). A recent Guardian article warned that podcasts was one remaining area still insufficiently policed. ProPublica on Sunday did the same about Apple, and last month one of its reporters appeared on MSNBC to demand that Apple censor its podcast content as aggressively as Google’s YouTube now censors its video content.

Thus do we have the unimaginably warped dynamic in which U.S. journalists are not the defenders of free speech values but the primary crusaders to destroy them. They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous “disinformation.” And they do it from petty vindictiveness: they clearly get aroused — find otherwise-elusive purpose — by destroying people’s reputations and lives, no matter how powerless. Whatever the motive, corporate media employees whose company title is “journalist” are the primary activists against a free and open internet and the core values of free thought.

Is The Elite Overreaction To Trump An Overtly Feminized Expression Of Fear?

TAC |  Let's not attribute to malice that which can be explained by an insecure elite stumbling back into a tenuous grasp on power.

There is a real question worth asking here, and it lies at the heart of our current political dysfunction: why do the people in power, in government and beyond, consistently act in a way that makes them look like part of some vast left-wing conspiracy? Why are tectonic policy shifts at the state level being arranged around the transfer of power at the federal? Why did the media and big business suddenly change their tune on the miracle date of January 20?

I think the answer is fairly simple, and a lot less nefarious than some of the alternatives.

We hear a lot of talk these days about “the politics of fear,” and it’s almost exclusively directed at the right (and almost exclusively in ridiculous ways): the only reason anyone possibly could have voted for Donald Trump is that they’re conditioned to fear Xi Jinping, or Jack Dorsey, or black people; the only reason to oppose progressive social policies is a fear of homosexuals, or of women, or of men who think they’re women; the only reason to reject the candidates of Wall Street—whose names are always tagged with a big, dark capital “D”—is fear that our backwards way of life will be ravaged by Kamala Harris’ lizard-people overlords; et cetera, et cetera, until it becomes apparent that the only possible explanation for any of the left’s electoral failures is some deep terror ingrained in the minds of half the voting public.

But it’s worth talking too about the fear that drives the left. There’s the obvious example of the pandemic—the hysteria that left most of Blue America hunkered down like it was a nuclear apocalypse, only to bravely emerge from their bunkers in droves on November 3. That’s the same kind of fear that underlies the really fanatical climate stuff. But there’s another kind too, and it essentially boils down to a fear of opposition, a fear of not being in power.

It’s a function of our adversarial politics: when you see no way of working with someone, when you can find no common ground, when the stated goals of that person go against everything you believe, you’re probably going to be terrified of any situation in which that person has power and you don’t. And it’s not fear of the extremes, either—call me an optimist, but I don’t think there are many people stupid enough to sincerely believe that Donald Trump is a fascist. We live in a world where four years of sometimes-successful administration by a scattershot, moderate conservative puts the fear of God in about 80 million people.

So why does everything change the second 45 gives way to 46? It doesn’t require Don Jr.’s hypothetical nefarious plot. All it requires is that people in positions of power—the people who are terrified of losing those positions—act exactly as we would expect them to act under the influence of that terror. That doesn’t just mean Democratic governors who overplayed their hands, and then rethought their moves the second they stepped into a post-Trump world. It means the huge companies that, for the first time (and likely the last time) in a long time, didn’t have a buddy in the White House and now are ready to dive back into the game. It means the legacy media that went through a well-earned hell over the past five years, and now get a little breathing room to lob softball questions at a friendly politician. It means every American who subscribes to the progressive culture and narrative that dominate our institutions, who worried just for a moment that maybe they wouldn’t always be in control.

 

 

Whither Now The Intersectional Identitarian Project?

 wsws  |  Since the late 1960s, the efforts to racialize scholarly work, against which Genovese rightly polemicized, have assumed such vast proportions that they cannot be adequately described as merely “inane.” Under the influence of postmodernism and its offspring, “critical race theory,” the doors of American universities have been flung wide open for the propagation of deeply reactionary conceptions. Racial identity has replaced social class and related economic processes as the principal and essential analytic category.

Whiteness” theory, the latest rage, is now utilized to deny historical progress, reject objective truth, and interpret all events and facets of culture through the prism of alleged racial self-interest. On this basis, the sheerest nonsense can be spouted with the guarantee that all objections grounded on facts and science will be dismissed as a manifestation of “white fragility” or some other form of hidden racism. In this degraded environment, Ibram X. Kendi can write the following absurd passage, without fear of contradiction, in his Stamped from the Beginning:

For Enlightenment intellectuals, the metaphor of light typically had a double meaning. Europeans had rediscovered learning after a thousand years in religious darkness, and their bright continental beacon of insight existed in the midst of a “dark” world not yet touched by light. Light, then, became a metaphor for Europeanness, and therefore Whiteness, a notion that Benjamin Franklin and his philosophical society eagerly embraced and imported to the colonies. … Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness and Blackness and ignorance, on the other. [19]

This is a ridiculous concoction that attributes to the word “Enlightenment” a racial significance that has absolutely no foundation in etymology, let alone history. The word employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784 to describe this period of scientific advance was Aufklärung, which may be translated from the German as “clarification” or “clearing up,” connoting an intellectual awakening. The English translation of Aufklärung as Enlightenment dates from 1865, seventy-five years after the death of Benjamin Franklin, whom Kendi references in support of his racial argument. [20]

Another term used by English speaking people to describe the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been “The Age of Reason,” which was employed by Tom Paine in his scathing assault on religion and all forms of superstition. Kendi’s attempt to root Enlightenment in a white racist impulse is based on nothing but empty juggling with words. In point of fact, modern racism is connected historically and intellectually to the Anti-Enlightenment, whose most significant nineteenth century representative, Count Gobineau, wrote The Inequality of the Human Races. But actual history plays no role in the formulation of Kendi’s pseudo-intellectual fabrications. His work is stamped with ignorance.

istory is not the only discipline assaulted by the race specialists. In an essay titled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” Professor Philip A. Ewell of Hunter College in New York declares, “I posit that there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.” [21]

This degradation of music theory divests the discipline of its scientific and historically developed character. The complex principles and elements of composition, counterpoint, tonality, consonance, dissonance, timbre, rhythm, notation, etc. are derived, Ewell claims, from racial characteristics. Professor Ewell is loitering in the ideological territory of the Third Reich. There is more than a passing resemblance between his call for the liberation of music from “whiteness” and the efforts of Nazi academics in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s to liberate music from “Jewishness.” The Nazis denounced Mendelssohn as a mediocrity whose popularity was the insidious manifestation of Jewish efforts to dominate Aryan culture. In similar fashion, Ewell proclaims that Beethoven was merely “above average as a composer,” and that he “occupies the place he does because he has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for two hundred years.” [22]

Academic journals covering virtually every field of study are exploding with ignorant rubbish of this sort. Even physics has not escaped the onslaught of racial theorizing. In a recent essay, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, assistant physics professor at the University of New Hampshire, proclaims that “race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics,” and introduces the concept of “white empiricism” (italics in the original), which “comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena.” [23]

Prescod-Weinstein asserts that “knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists,” the racial and gender background of scientists affects the way scientific research is conducted, and, therefore, the observations and experiments conducted by African-American and female physicists will produce results different than those conducted by white males. Prescod-Weinstein identifies with the contingentists who “challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.” [24]

Can A Black Woman Be A Physicist?

uchicago  |   In this article I take on the question of how the exclusion of Black American women from physics impacts physics epistemologies, and I highlight the dynamic relationship between this exclusion and the struggle for women to reconcile “Black woman” with “physicist.” I describe the phenomenon where white epistemic claims about science—which are not rooted in empirical evidence—receive more credence and attention than Black women’s epistemic claims about their own lives. To develop this idea, I apply an intersectional analysis to Joseph Martin’s concept of prestige asymmetry in physics, developing the concept of white empiricism to discuss the impact that Black women’s exclusion has had on physics epistemology. By considering the essentialization of racism and sexism alongside the social construction of ascribed identities, I assess the way Black women physicists self-construct as scientists and the subsequent impact of epistemic outcomes on the science itself.

Who is allowed to be an observer in physics, and who is fundamentally denied the possibility? In this article, I propose that race and ethnicity impact epistemic outcomes in physics, despite the universality of the laws that undergird physics, and I introduce the concept of white empiricism to provide one explanation for why. White empiricism is the phenomenon through which only white people (particularly white men) are read has having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and Black people (particularly Black women) are produced as an ontological other. This phenomenon is stabilized through the production and retention of what Joseph Martin calls prestige asymmetry, which explains how social resources in physics are distributed based on prestige. In American society, Black women are on the losing end of an ontic prestige asymmetry whereby different scientists “garner unequal public approbation” in their everyday lives due to ascribed identities such as gender and race (Martin 2017, 475). White empiricism is one of the mechanisms by which this asymmetry follows Black women physicists into their professional lives. Because white empiricism contravenes core tenets of modern physics (e.g., covariance and relativity), it negatively impacts scientific outcomes and harms the people who are othered.

White empiricism comes to dominate empirical discourse in physics because whiteness powerfully shapes the predominant arbiters of who is a valid observer of physical and social phenomena. Based primarily on their own experiences, white men, who are the dominant demographic in physics, construct the figure of the observer to exclude anyone who does not share the attending social and intellectual identities and beliefs. These beliefs can limit investigations of what constitutes a reasonable physical theory, whether the scientific method should be brought to bear on this physical theory, and the capacity to understand how incidents of racism disrupt the potential for objective discourse. Essentially, white empiricism involves a predominantly white, predominantly male professional community selectively failing to apply the scientific method to themselves while using “scientific” evaluation to strengthen the barriers to Black women’s entry into physics. White empiricism is therefore a form of antiempiricism masquerading as an empirical approach to the natural world. By denying agency to Black women in discussions of racism, white empiricism predetermines the experiences of Black women in physics.

To provide an example of the role that white empiricism plays in physics, I discuss the current debate in string theory about postempiricism, motivated in part by a question: why are string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to racial hegemony? I believe the answer is that knowledge production in physics is contingent on the ascribed identities of the physicists. Contingentists focus on top-down social forces, or the contingency associated with laboratory instrumentation; in this way, they challenge any assumption that scientific decision making is purely objective.¹ Scientists are also typically monists—believers in the idea that there is only one science—who, rather than feeling burdened to prove there is only one science, expect contingentists to prove that there can be more than one (Soler 2015b). This monist approach to science typically forecloses a closer investigation of how identity and epistemic outcomes intermix.

 

Superficially, Gebru Was Not Fired For Her Paper, She Was Fired For This Email

1/ I woke up thinking about #TimnitGebru and how #google and @JeffDean used the flimsiest of HR bullshit to fire her. And let's be clear, she was fired. How do I know this, because I have been on both sides of that situation. Here's how it's done #ISupportTimnit

— Leslie Miley (@shaft) December 5, 2020

 platformer | Hi friends,

I had stopped writing here as you may know, after all the micro and macro aggressions and harassments I received after posting my stories here (and then of course it started being moderated).

Recently however, I was contributing to a document that Katherine and Daphne were writing where they were dismayed by the fact that after all this talk, this org seems to have hired 14% or so women this year. Samy has hired 39% from what I understand but he has zero incentive to do this.

What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. Because there is zero accountability. There is no incentive to hire 39% women: your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people, you start making the other leaders upset when they don’t want to give you good ratings during calibration. There is no way more documents or more conversations will achieve anything. We just had a Black research all hands with such an emotional show of exasperation. Do you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way possible.

Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? Does that sound like a standard procedure to you or does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized?

Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from PR & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t heard from PR & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months). A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.

Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed?

And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.

Then you try to engage in a conversation about how this is not acceptable and people start doing the opposite of any sort of self reflection—trying to find scapegoats to blame.

Silencing marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU principles which we discussed. And doing this in the context of “responsible AI” adds so much salt to the wounds. I understand that the only things that mean anything at Google are levels, I’ve seen how my expertise has been completely dismissed. But now there’s an additional layer saying any privileged person can decide that they don’t want your paper out with zero conversation. So you’re blocked from adding your voice to the research community—your work which you do on top of the other marginalization you face here.

I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off--before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.

So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen.

Timnit

An Anonymous, Whydte-Identified Gamma Jew Loses His Shidt Over Hozumi's Musty Panny-Hustle...,

tremr  |   Tada is correct in his insistence on the need to approach politics from a partially personological (rather than a purely systemic) approach. In order to understand the roots of Oluo's deeply deficient and distorted perspective, it is very important to understand that studies indicate major differences in narcissistic personality traits among individuals from different racial groups. 

In general, African Americans tend to exhibit the highest rates of narcissistic personality traits, with East Asians (perhaps with the exception of Tada) possessing the lowest levels of groups measured. While some have suggested that the alleged "black self-esteem advantage" that is well-known among social scientists, may explain these heightened levels of narcissism, as a kind of compensatory attempt at preserving self-esteem in the face of marginalization, other marginalized groups, such as Hispanics, do not exhibit this heightened self-esteem, throwing this hypothesis into question.

Such a self-esteem advantage is likewise absent among East Asians, and East Asians have lower levels of self-esteem than whites. Of course, since East Asians, on average, have higher levels of income than Caucasians in the U.S., we may rightly question whether it is proper to consider them "marginalized" in any meaningful sense of the word. Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Marion T. Wallace stated their "Overview and Predictions" in their three studies as follows:

"Our goal for the present studies was to examine whether racial differences emerged for narcissism in a manner that was similar to the Black self-esteem advantage. This was accomplished by conducting three studies that compared the narcissism levels of Black and White individuals. The present research extends the findings of Foster et al. (2003) by using various measures of narcissism rather than relying solely on the NPI. Also, the present studies accounted for factors related to narcissism such as self-esteem level and socially desirable response tendencies in order to clarify the nature of any racial differences in narcissism that emerged. Given previous research concerning racial/ethnic differences in narcissism as well as the fragile nature of the high levels of self-esteem reported by Black individuals, we expected Black individuals to report higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. Finally, Study 3 included indicators of psychological adjustment so that we could examine whether race moderated the association between narcissism and psychological adjustment."

In their second study, they found that "Black individuals possess higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. The magnitude of the differences varied across the facets of narcissism such that the largest differences were found for those facets that captured grandiosity and self-absorption...". Consistently across these studies, they found that black individuals exhibit higher levels of narcissism than white individuals. This is exactly what one would expect in a cultural context in which activists in the Black Lives Matter movement insist that blacks cannot be racist. Their claim is that the definition of "racism" was changed a few decades ago, so that it can only be used to speak of those whose systemic power allows them to express their prejudices institutionally. Of course, the only reason they insist on this definition is because of the tremendously negative emotional payload the word "racism" has.

The obvious underlying psychological motive in insisting that the definition of "racism" can only refer to discrimination by those with the institutional power to enforce their prejudices is that blacks cannot be held accountable for their actions in spite of the fact that, on an individual basis, they tend to engage in much higher rates of race-based crime, and they likewise feel comfortable accusing whites of being racist merely for being white, despite the fact that whites are far less likely than blacks or Hispanics to engage in interracial crime on an individual level. While systemic racism exists, we must emphasize that in this post, we are merely following Tada's approach in looking at racism from a purely personological perspective.

Tada - Macking On Musty Patchouli Pannies Involves A Swole Peen, Not A Swole Belly....,

selfishactivist |  For the last two years, I’ve been actively and covertly being bullied by a group of people who have been engaging in accountability abuse and smears about me in various local communities around Montreal and the general area of the Pacific North West.

This has resulted in the loss of relationships with colleagues and clients, as well as work and income that went along with those relationships, including more recently being asked to step away from facilitation at an ancestral skills gathering, after smears reached some of their stakeholders.

During this time, I’ve also suffered from debilitating chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and vertigo during this period, which has been profoundly affected by the bullying. I’m luckily more resourced, in both a psycho-emotional sense and financial sense, than other people in my community, but I know many people in my community would not have been so lucky and ended up permanently traumatized.

As I am coming out of the worst of my condition, I feel like finally have the energy to address these matters more actively and take the responsibility to protect myself and the people who are connected to my work.

I want to specify that this note is a call for accountability from those who have bullied me, with the understanding that accountability is a path to repair.

Here, I want to share with you how I define what has been happening to me as accountability abuse and a form of defamation.

In the more-than-a-year period of constant secretive communications of projections and fabrications about me being spread in my local communities, I have received no direct contact or engagement from any core parties about the actual claims of me, and therefore no due process, no clarification, and no attempt at verification, all the while I have suffered massive damage to my mental health and relationships.

The innate lack of transparency and accountability of these claims defines what I refer to as accountability abuse – abuses of power that happen under the pretense of holding someone accountable for harm, which in turn abuses the spirit of accountability itself.

Adding to this problematic dynamic has been that the many community members who were engaged by this campaign, many of whom are organizers with ample social capital, would tell me that they cannot share who the claimants or what the claims are because they deserve to be protected, even while they pursued or enabled actions that harm me emotionally and financially.

My feelings about this are very clear: it is problematic for people to be able to say whatever they want about others under such protective anonymity AND have their claims validated through belief and action – it creates an extremely untransparent and unaccountable dynamic that is easily manipulated. For myself, I would love to see our communities adopt a standard that claims are deemed lacking actionable validity until they are specifically backed up by information such as who is the claimant and what they are claiming AND all parties are able to respond to transparent information.

Survivors 100% deserve trauma-informed attention and be heard, that is my core belief as a therapist, but we also need to be held responsible for having courage, in order to facilitate real healing and prevent traumatic patterns causing unnecessary harm through projection and fabrication. What I have seen over and over again is that, without such responsibility, survivor support turns into codependent coddling that reifies trauma.

 

Tada Hozumi: Woke Soy Boy Macking On Patchouli Pannies ...,

selfishactivist |  I understand that for some people this may draw confusion because the hall-of-fame of somatics in our minds is plastered with the images of white teachers and innovators.

Yet, somatics remains an Asian cultural form in its modern roots.

Acknowledging this is similar to how we may appropriately recognize funk and rock n’ roll as Black music. While robust polyrhythms and boisterous dance circles are a feature of almost any culture if you excavate deeper, it is undoubtedly Black people and their culture, i.e. the collective work of their ancestors, that have kept alive these Afro-diasporic traditions and gifted them to those of us who live in the context of the modern post-colonial project.

Somatics, the practice of affecting change through felt-sense interoception of the body, has a similar story. Since the post-war era of the 1950s, and even before that on a smaller scale, Asian cultural practices such as qigong, yoga, zen, energetic martial arts, energy work, and Chinese medicine proliferated throughout the Western world, often accompanied by a variety of Asian philosophical orientations from Buddhism to Daoism.

The modern Western somatic modalities we have come to commonly know, from Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Method, Generative Somatics, Embodied Leadership (Strozzi Institute), Feldenkrais, and so on, all derive their foundational somatic practices from these Asian cultural traditions. In more recent years, these embodiment tools that have been traditionally accessed for individual healing are now more and more being accessed for politicized collective healing.

Now, here is a question: with all this resourcing from our ancestors, how much do people actually know about Asian cultures? Or even better, how much can people humbly admit that they DON’T know? Because while our ancestors’ treasures have been sending gifts to the West, there has been very little understanding of who we are, what it is, the essence of ‘Asianness’ we embody, even within social justice circles that purportedly are about exploring and celebrating that which is marginalized.

The reality is, we have continuously been the last thought, constantly triaged out of relevance using a metric that we know as the hierarchy of oppression. And perhaps, there is some twisted validity in the idea that things just aren’t as bad for us so we matter less.

But lying deeper than this surface logic is a problem that eats itself. The supposedly semi-reasonable idea that we are the least important issue in the problem of racism, doesn’t mean that healing anti-Asianness can’t be the most critical key to solving the koan that systemic oppression is.

My aspirations in cultural somatics have always been about addressing this very core issue – to reclaim somatics, as an Asian cultural form, as an Asian person. In my own first explorations of the work that I now refer to as cultural somatics was a yearning to create a framework that understands change, even social change, as wholly encapsulated in the body and its innate mysterious non-dual nature, that flips and synthesizes yin and yang in a constant process of alchemy.

This mattered to me deeply because in all honestly, I just had enough of activist spaces that touted banners of ‘resistance’ and ’solidarity’ but consequently had no room for the distinctly Asian embodied sensibilities of ‘yielding’ and ‘fluidity’ as power and resource. I definitely have the first-hand experience of getting shut down for suggesting that these may be also valuable strategies for ‘fighting the enemy’.

Feminized View Through Overton's Window Of Glenn Greenwald's Departure....,

nymag  |  In Greenwald’s view, The Intercept was founded in order to resist such censorious impulses but has since succumbed to them, as he put it in his resignation essay:

Rather than offering a venue for airing dissent, marginalized voices and unheard perspectives, [The Intercept] is rapidly becoming just another media outlet with mandated ideological and partisan loyalties, a rigid and narrow range of permitted viewpoints (ranging from establishment liberalism to soft leftism, but always anchored in ultimate support for the Democratic Party), a deep fear of offending hegemonic cultural liberalism and center-left Twitter luminaries, and an overarching need to secure the approval and admiration of the very mainstream media outlets we created The Intercept to oppose, critique and subvert.

“He could have chosen to be a part of the mix, part of the conversation, the daily, weekly conversation about what we should be covering and what stories we were working on,” Hodge said. “But he never did that. He always held himself aloof from the newsroom and never, ever soiled himself with the day-to-day business of news gathering.”

Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s D.C. bureau chief, told Intelligencer that Greenwald’s conflict with The Intercept was part of a larger culture clash between Greenwald, a civil libertarian who objects in the strongest possible terms to any limitations on freedom of speech, and some of his younger left-leaning colleagues, who believe they have a responsibility to call out and try to shut down what they consider hateful or harmful speech. Greenwald wrote that he eventually concluded The Intercept itself embraced this so-called “cancel culture” in being reluctant to publish anything (like his Biden column) that might lead to accusations of aiding Trump and his supporters.

“There’s a phenomenon that exists everywhere, from corporate America to media, where the politics of younger people are different from the politics of some of the older people in these places,” Grim said. “The whole ‘woke debate’ that is played out endlessly on Twitter — he felt like there was too much of that going on at The Intercept.”

Once such example is a previously unreported incident from November 2018, when a group of Intercept staffers joined a virtual protest about Topic magazine, which was owned by the Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media. According to four First Look Media employees, the staffers went on the company’s Slack channel to object to Topic editor-in-chief Anna Holmes’s decision to publish a story about women who belonged to far-right groups, which included glamorous portraits of the women. The protest offended a number of senior Intercept editors, including Greenwald, who objected to the targeting of Holmes, a Black woman, and the suggestion that certain articles shouldn’t be published. (Nothing came of the protest, but Topic was shuttered in 2019 for unrelated financial reasons.)

Following the protest, Greenwald published a column that very pointedly criticized “the growing so-called ‘online call-out culture’ in which people who express controversial political views are not merely critiqued but demonized online and then formally and institutionally punished after a mob consolidates in outrage, often targeting their employers with demands that they be terminated.”

Another flash point occurred in June of this year, when Intercept reporter Akela Lacy publicly called out her colleague Lee Fang for “racist” behavior, including tweets about violence and Black Lives Matter protests. While Fang later released a thoughtful apology, many outside commentators saw him as a victim of cancel culture. In his resignation essay, Greenwald specifically criticized The Intercept’s “decision to hang Lee Fang out to dry and even force him to apologize when a colleague tried to destroy his reputation by publicly, baselessly and repeatedly branding him a racist.” Fang did not respond to a request for comment.

These generational and cultural dynamics have divided a number of newsrooms during the Trump administration.

Great Reset's Intersectional Hijacking Of Non-Whydte Wymyn Victim Vectors

strategic-culture |  People living in the western world are in the greatest fight for the future of pluralist and republican forms of governance since the rise and fall of fascism 75 years ago. As then, society had to be built up from a war. Today’s war has been an economic war of the oligarchs against the republic, and it increasingly appears that the coronavirus pandemic is being used, on the political end, as a massive coup against pluralist society. We are being confronted with this ‘great reset’, alluding to post-war construction. But for a whole generation people have already been living under an ever-increasing austerity regimen. This is a regimen that can only be explained as some toxic combination of the systemic inevitabilities of a consumer-driven society on the foundation of planned obsolescence, and the never-ending greed and lust for power which defines whole sections of the sociopathic oligarchy.

Recently we saw UK PM Boris Johnson stand in front of a ‘Build Back Better’ sign, speaking to the need for a ‘great reset’. ‘Build Back Better’ happens to be Joe Biden’s campaign slogan, which raises many other questions for another time. But, to what extent are the handlers who manage ‘Joe Biden’, and those managing ‘Boris Johnson’ working the same script?

The more pertinent question is to ask: in whose interest is this ‘great reset’ being carried out? Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers upon the theory and practice of austerity. Certainly it cannot be left to those who have built their careers as puppets of a morally decaying oligarchy.

What Johnson calls the ‘Great Reset’, Biden calls the ‘Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice’. Certainly the coming economy cannot be left to Boris Johnson or Joe Biden.

How is it that now Boris Johnson speaks publicly of a ‘great reset’, whereas just months ago when those outside the ruling media paradigm used this phrase, it was censured by corporate Atlanticist media as being conspiratorial in nature? This is an excellent question posed by Neil Clark.

And so we have by now all read numerous articles in the official press talking about how economic life after coronavirus will never be the same as it was before. Atlanticist press has even run numerous opinion articles talking about how this may cut against globalization – a fair point, and one which many thinking people by and large agree with.

Yet they have set aside any substantive discussion about what exists in lieu of globalization, and what the economy looks like in various parts of the world if it is not globalized. We have consistently spoken of multipolarity, a term that in decades past was utilized frequently in western vectors, in the sphere of geopolitics and international relations. Now there is some strange ban on the term, and so we are now bereft of a language with which to have an honest discussion about the post-globalization paradigm.

Kampf der Nibelungen: Combat Sports Undermine The State's Monopoly On Violence?!?!

al-jazeera  |  “Kampf der Nibelungen” or “Battle of the Nibelungs,” a reference to old Germanic and Norse legends, is beloved by white supremacists from across Europe and beyond – they are both fans and fighters.

With German authorities keeping a close eye on them after banning their previous event in 2019, organisers are planning to stream their far-right fight-night of boxing, kickboxing and mixed martial arts (MMA) online this Saturday.

Observers warn Al Jazeera that Europe’s far-right groups are using combat sports to recruit young men and train them for literal battle in the streets.

“They are violent neo-Nazis training for physical violence,” said Robert Claus, a German journalist and author of a new book on combat sports and the European far right.

The individuals behind Kampf der Nibelungen are violent and “dangerous”, he added.

There is “a very long list of racist attacks which comes out of the network of Kampf der Nibelungen”.

Moreover, Claus is concerned about the longer-term consequences if Kampf der Nibelungen goes ahead as planned.

“They’re showing a middle finger to German authorities,” he said. “If they manage to go ahead and broadcast this event in defiance of German authorities, it undermines the state’s monopoly on violence and the authority of the state.”

 

Corrupt Corrosive Covens That Have Profoundly Damaged America...,

 chicagounheard  |  Teachers unions don’t like to affiliate themselves with police unions.  The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) recently advocated for pulling Chicago police from the city’s schools.  As we see the police brutality against Black people continue unabated even as the light of transparency increases, police unions are not very popular. They protect rogue and abusive police officers and have for hundreds of years.  They fight reform and any sorts of limits on their power. 

And they do their job well.  Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer, who brutally killed George Floyd, had 18 prior complaints against him and still had his job.   Police unions are effective at protecting their members.  

And it is the same with teachers unions. When police officers or teachers are accused of wrongdoing, it is the union that supplies the public relations spin, the lawyers and the defense. 

Teacher unions want you to believe that they are about students, that they are social justice warriors, fighting for sanctuary cities, DREAMers and others, but their fundamental purpose is to increase teachers’ pay, lower their class sizes and protect their jobs.  And in these roles, they are successful.  When I was a teacher, that is what I wanted from my union. 

It is not the union’s job to protect students; their job is to help teachers keep their jobs. Sadly, this is still the teacher union’s job, even when teacher members are sexual molesters and otherwise abusive.  In the 2018 series Betrayed, the Chicago Tribune uncovered hundreds of cases of sexual assault and abuse by teachers and school staff in Chicago’s public schools over the previous 10 years; there are myriad examples of predators moving from school to school. It is impossible to know the exact number because records are spotty.  

In Betrayed, there is evidence of the failings of every step of the school system while the CTU remained silent.  Apparently, their leader, Jesse Sharkey, “missed” the emails from investigators.  What could he say?

It is not hard to argue that these recent actions of both police and teacher unions are not in the public interest. Both enjoy significant political power from supporting elected officials who advocate for them. The unions often fight any legislation aimed at increasing teacher accountability and transparency or eroding the robust job protections that teachers and police officers enjoy.

Sadly, almost everyone has a story of a bad teacher. When I was a teacher, I had a colleague who was just waiting to retire.  For two years, I saw the energetic and intellectually curious 6^th graders in her class shrivel. It was heartbreaking.

The barriers to firing ineffective–not to mention harmful or predatory– teachers are almost insurmountable thanks to tenure laws, which give teachers almost 100% job protection once they have taught for a few years.  This probationary period is different in different districts, but teacher unions always fight for the shortest probationary period possible. 

Both teachers and police officers work with the public when they are at their most vulnerable.

Feminist Grievance: Antifa's Intersectional Nexus With The Public School Karenwaffen

epochtimes  |  Having the organizational infrastructure in place, unionized K-12 teachers and staff are the perfect societal, organized group to take the combination of masks, grievance, and narcissism and operationalize it as the shock troops for taking down the American constitutional system. Rick Moran identified this in his 2017 piece, “Dozens of public school teachers involved in Antifa.” It was a clarion call that something was going on.

The arrest reports from around the country have shown a high number of those arrested are part of the K-12 education system. Often times, arrests from Portland have reflected numbers north of 50 percent. Andy Ngo and others have done an excellent job of documenting this connection—often at great personal risk. The street thugs of Antifa and BLM seem to lose their “bravery” once the mask comes off and they are exposed.

Do not quibble, do not try to rationalize with the mob—reject their thesis and aggressively deal with them—both citizens and all levels of government must lock shoulders and stand against the blind rage of the street mobbery. Once specific personalities are personally held liable for the death and destruction they create, the violence will rapidly go away.

This is not just the masked actors—this includes the state and local leaders and politicians that act in a feckless, hapless matter. Fecklessness may not be a crime, but results count, so citizens, please hold these politicians and leaders responsible through recall petitions and new elections.

 

Why Are Parasitic Elites Trying To Cancel Conscious Masculinity?

theintercept  |   The objections typically raised to Rogan concern his questioning of some of the very recent changes brought about by trans visibility and equality, particularly asking whether it is fair for trans women who have lived their entire lives and entered puberty as biological men to compete against cis women in professional sports (a question also asked — and even answered in the negative — by LGBT sports pioneer Martina Navratilova, among many others), and whether young children are emotionally and psychologically equipped to make permanent choices about gender reassignment therapies and gender dysphoria.

If embracing and never questioning the full panoply of trans advocacy is a prerequisite to being permitted in decent society, I seriously doubt many prominent Democratic politicians will pass that test (even Kamala Harris, from San Francisco and the very blue state of California, has a very mixed record on trans rights). Moreover, though polling data is sparse, the data that is available show that there is still much work to do in this area: Only a small minority of Americans believe it is fair to allow trans women to participate in female professional sports.

While Rogan is politically liberal, he is — argues former Obama 2008 campaign strategist and Rogan listener Shant Mesrobian — culturally conservative, by which he does not mean that Rogan holds conservative views on social issues (again, he is pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights). He means that Rogan exudes culturally conservative signals: He likes MMA fighting, makes crude jokes, hunts, and just generally fails to speak in the lingo of the professional managerial class and coastal elites. And it is those cultural standards, rather than political ones, that make Rogan anathema to elite liberal culture because, Mesrobian argued in a viral Twitter thread, liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.

As Rogan’s platform grows, it is worthwhile to understand his appeal, his audience, and what he is doing that is new and different to attract such a large following. But it is also very worth examining the reaction to him by the political and media class because in that reaction, one finds many revealing attributes about how they think, what they value, and the priorities that they actually venerate.

 

Cancel Adolph Reed? Many On The Left Have A Militant Objection To Thinking Analytically

NYTimes |  “An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed told me. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”

These battles are not new: In the late 19th century, Socialists wrestled with their own racism and debated the extent to which they should try to build a multiracial organization. Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, was muscular in his insistence that his party advocate racial equality. Similar questions roiled the civil rights and Black power movements of the 1960s.

But the debate has been reignited by the spread of the deadly virus and the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And it has taken on a generational tone, as Socialism — in the 1980s largely the redoubt of aging leftists — now attracts many younger people eager to reshape organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, which has existed in various permutations since the 1920s. (A Gallup poll late last year found that Socialism is now as popular as capitalism among people aged 18 to 39.)

The D.S.A. now has more than 70,000 members nationally and 5,800 in New York — and their average age now hovers in the early 30s. While the party is much smaller than, say, Democrats and Republicans, it has become an unlikely kingmaker, helping fuel the victories of Democratic Party candidates such as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, who beat a longtime Democratic incumbent in a June primary.

In years past, the D.S.A. had welcomed Professor Reed as a speaker. But younger members, chafing at their Covid-19 isolation and throwing themselves into “Defund the Police” and anti-Trump protests, were angered to learn of the invitation extended to him.

“People have very strong concerns,” Chi Anunwa, co-chair of D.S.A.’s New York chapter, said on a Zoom call. They said “the talk was too dismissive of racial disparities at a very tense point in American life.”

Professor Taylor of Princeton said Professor Reed should have known his planned talk on Covid-19 and the dangers of obsessing about racial disparities would register as “a provocation. It was quite incendiary.”

Karen Lives Matter

flatlandkc |  They started popping up in Kansas City neighborhoods in late April — homemade barriers, some quite creative, informing motorists a block is closed to traffic except for residents and deliveries. 

Call it a pandemic experiment. As schools, workplaces and even some public spaces like playgrounds closed, Kansas City rolled out a program called Neighborhood Open Streets. With minimal hassle, residents can apply for a city permit to close their blocks to through traffic.

Depending on who you’re talking to, Neighborhood Open Streets is either a) an inspired step toward a safer, happier community; or b) a colossal nuisance.

In general, people who live on the closed blocks tend to favor the safety and community argument. Motorists forced to detour around them seethe over the inconvenience.

“I’m all for it,” said Diana Halverson, whose block on 70th Street off of Ward Parkway got a permit. 

Halverson’s block has been seeing a lot of traffic in recent months because of construction projects on Gregory Boulevard, two blocks to the south. So when a neighbor proposed applying for a closure permit, she heartily agreed. 

“Got it in one day,” she said.

Unlike the process for a block party permit, which requires signatures from a majority of residents to close the street for a few hours, applicants for a Neighborhood Open Streets permit need only fill out a form and submit evidence — like a text or email — that they informed their neighbors of their intent.

“We had a strict social distancing order in place,” said Maggie Green, information officer for Kansas City’s Public Works Department. “The last thing we wanted to do was encourage people to knock on doors.”

So far, the department has issued permits for 37 blocks, Green said. The majority are in the 4th and 6th City Council districts, and the program is especially popular in the southwest corridor.

Left-Wing, Non-Violent Protesters: Why Is No One Ready....?