Magic The Gathering...,Ta Loco? This LARP Here Taking Cosplay WAAAAY Too Far!!!

conandaily |  Jessica Marie Watkins is a white transgender woman from Ohio, United States. Here are 13 more things about her:

1. She lives in Woodstock, Champaign County, Ohio. (a)
2. In 2001, she graduated from high school and joined the U.S. Army. She completed airborne training before being deployed to Afghanistan. (a)
3. From 2010 to 2014, she worked for the Stoney Point Fire Department in Fayetteville, Cumberland County, North Carolina, USA. She started as a volunteer before becoming a full-time firefighter and emergency medical technician. (a)
4. She met her longtime boyfriend Montana Siniff playing “Magic: The Gathering” in a card shop in Hilliard, Franklin County, Ohio. In 2018, they bought a bar in Woodstock and moved into the apartment upstairs. (a)
5. She is a member of the Oath Keepers. She is also the commanding officer of the Ohio State Regular Militia, which she formed in 2019 after a string of tornadoes ripped through Dayton, Montgomery County, Ohio. In the same year, she and Siniff started running their newly purchased bar in Woodstock. (a) (b)
6. In 2020, she renamed her bar in Woodstock as the Jolly Roger and regularly watched videos on Infowars, the far-right conspiracy-driven website run by Alex Jones, according to Siniff. In the same year, answering a nationwide call from Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, Ohio State Regular Militia members patrolled Louisville, Kentucky, USA amid protests over the police killing of Breonna Taylor. (a)
7. Days after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in November 2020, Siniff accompanied her as they answered a call from the Oath Keepers to go to Washington, D.C. to attend Trump’s Million MAGA March. She and Siniff stayed at the farm of Oath Keepers member Thomas Edward Caldwell in Virginia, USA. (a)
8. On January 4, 2021, she left Ohio with Ohio State Regular Militia members. (b)
9. Wearing goggles, a bulletproof vest and fatigues bearing Oath Keeper insignias, she went to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., USA on January 6, 2021 with eight other Oath Keepers members including Donovan Crowl.

Biologically Female Athletes Should NEVER Have To Compete With M-to-F Transgenders

usatoday |  On his first day in office last month, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which threatened to pull federal funding from schools unless they allow transgender women to compete on girls’ sports teams. On Thursday, the House passed a bill that would write this policy permanently into law. 

Like many Americans with common sense, we strongly oppose these radical and unfair measures. And like many parents, our opposition is rooted in the care and concern we have for our daughters.

Participation in sports has had a positive impact on countless young women, helping them to develop leadership skills and learn to work together as a team. Striving to be the best is the goal, and valuable opportunities can stem from the competition. However, these lessons and opportunities would be seriously endangered if transgender women are allowed to compete in girls' sports. Indeed, the entirety of women's athletics would be deeply imperiled.

The reason is obvious. Biological male athletes have an insurmountable physical advantage over biological female athletes. They have greater muscle mass,bigger and stronger bones, and larger hearts and lungs  than women. Moreover, one new study shows that even after taking female hormones, transgender women athletes still enjoy at least a temporary physical advantage on the playing field.

This reality cannot be ignored. It could even be dangerous.

For example, consider the implications of a young woman competing in boxing or another physical sport being matched up with a biological male opponent. Besides likely being at a fundamental disadvantage, she might also be at increased risk of severe injury based on physical differences. Unfortunately, this hypothetical has already played out in a 2013 incident, and it could have major consequences on the whole of women’s sports should such situations become more normal.

 

Racial Hypersensitivity Derangement Syndrome - Wokeness - Strictly Manmade But Very Real

tabletmag |  Of course there are real inequities in America, some of which are grounded in the legacies of racial discrimination. But visions to transform the country must reflect as complete and accurate a picture of social reality as can possibly be achieved. Steamrolling or suppressing inconvenient facts leaves us with a picture of reality that’s likely to be incomplete, erroneous, and consequently, harmful to progress.

Which brings us to the media’s selective and race-driven reporting on deadly police shootings. If the ultimate goal of such media coverage and the protests they generate is to effect police reform—greater transparency, accountability, etc.—the fetishization of Black victims of police shooting is hard to understand. Indeed, if this objective is paramount, then it would be best served by saturating the newswire whenever a person of any race is unjustly killed by law enforcement. Indeed, the more radical the goal of the movement, the more important it would appear to be that it attempt to appeal to the largest possible segment of the populace. That there is no dispositive evidence of racial bias in police use of deadly force would make this approach even more advisable. However, a recent analysis of mine shows that the opposite is happening.

Using data from The Washington Post Police Shootings database (2015-2020), I tallied and compared the number of search results for unarmed white versus Black police-shooting victims in a large data archive (ProQuest). In the end, and as depicted in the graph below, unarmed Black police-shooting victims generated nine times the number of news search results as white victims. What is more, roughly 32% of white victims generated zero search results as compared to just 12% of Black victims. None of these differences are explained by the elapsed time since the shooting nor any of the contextual, victim, or incident-related variables included in The Washington Post dataset (e.g., whether the victim fled from the responding officer, whether the victim attacked the responding officer, or whether the responding officer wore a body cam).

What the data presented here suggests is that editorial decisions made over the past decade at some of the most powerful media outlets in the world about what kind of language to use and what kind of stories merited coverage when it came to race—whatever the intention and level of forethought behind such decisions—has stoked a revival of racial consciousness among their readers. Intentionally or not, by introducing and then constantly repeating a set of key words and concepts, publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that “color” is the defining attribute of other human beings. For those who adopt this singular focus on race, a racialized view of the world becomes baseline test of political loyalty. It requires adherents to overlook the immense diversity among so-called “People of Color” and “People Not-of-Color” (i.e., whoever is being lumped together as “white” according to the prevailing ideological fashion). In doing so, it has made stereotypes socially acceptable, if not laudable.

The same media institutions that have promoted revanchist identitarianism and the radical transformation of American society along racial lines, could instead have focused their attention and influence on improving the quality of life for all. Working to ensure that Americans of any background aren’t unjustly victimized by the police and have access to quality health care, schools, and affordable housing doesn’t require the promotion of a “race-consciousness” that divides society into “oppressed” and “privileged” color categories. To the contrary, it requires that we de-emphasize these categories and unite in pursuit of common interests. This may not suit the media’s prerogatives, and it may not appeal to activists whose desire for cultural “recognition” trumps their devotion to material progress, but it does offer the potential benefit of improving the lives of ordinary Americans.

 

Tryna Set Up Political Party BLM Global Gets Rejected By Elections Commission And Grassroots BLM UK

dailymail  |  The Electoral Commission has rejected a controversial application to set up a Black Lives Matter (BLM) political party in Britain because its name would be 'likely to mislead voters'.

The independent election watchdog argued that a 'reasonable voter could assume that the party represents, or is in some way associated with' the grassroots BLM movement and its official UK affiliate.

A spokesperson told MailOnline that the party's proposed constitution and financial scheme were 'incomplete' and also rejected, as the manifesto did not determine the structure and organisation of the party. 

The application was submitted to the election watchdog by applicants whose identities remain unknown just five months after the killing of black man George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis.

His death triggered a cultural revolution in Britain that began with a wave of statue toppling by protesters and culminated in the founding of a Commission of Diversity in the Public Realm by London Mayor Sadiq Khan. 

Tory backbenchers claimed the application to set up the party proved that BLM was a partisan political project with Left-wing objectives, including 'deconstructing the concept of "family" and defunding the police'.  

However, at the time the bid was lodged the main Black Lives Matter UK (BLM UK) group insisted it had no affiliation with the applicants. 

White Nationalism Worse Than A Disease!!!

wired |  Our chimeric infectious cancer analogy for white nationalism might require something related but more focused: a war on white nationalism that is much lower on empathy than we’ve ever treated it, and higher on an appreciation for how large and disruptive a menace it truly is. Such a war would include the same administrative and legislative heft that has been given to the wars on drugs and foreign terrorism. (The latter served as the motivation for an entirely new executive department.) It would involve an intersection of experts from the intelligence, legal, criminal justice, and scholarly communities. And these experts would be charged with identifying all of the places that the infectious cancer hides in society, addressing the vulnerabilities in the American immune system, and cutting off the communication channels that serve as a bloodstream (e.g., social media) for white nationalism to further propagate, causing disseminated destruction. The Biden administration has already outlined formal plans for improved surveillance of emerging infectious disease in response to Covid-19. A similar process to address domestic terrorism could just as easily be activated.

Cancer analogies also have limits that oversimplify the blight of white nationalism. For one, cancer is driven by an undirected process driven by the laws of natural selection: Cancerous cells don’t know they’re disrupting anything. The 2021 strain of white nationalism, however, is engineered specifically for destruction. It is not a set of ideas that undermine the laws of the land by happenstance. Their purpose is to undermine them actively and directly.

These distinctions are more than just semantic: Too many narratives of white nationalism incorrectly depict its actors as exclusively low-class and uneducated. This trope says that the white nationalists aren’t really all that bad but are misguided, acting on ignorance, alienation, or economic anxiety.

This ragtag caricature of white nationalism evokes a cancerous cell blindly fomenting catastrophe through directionless meandering. The reality of white nationalism is closer to the opposite: It is a well-oiled machine, driven by nefarious actors with very specific goals in mind. And in this way, white nationalism isn’t much like cancer at all. There are no innocent, guileless actors, guilty only of being short-sighted. The purveyors of white nationalism live by a wicked creed that explicitly dehumanizes others.

If white nationalism isn’t a birth defect, a virus, or a cancer, should we dispense with disease analogies altogether? Why bother with explanatory vehicles at all?

The answer is that disease, in the abstract sense, does effectively capture the rot of white nationalism in important ways (many people even felt physically ill after seeing images of Charlottesville and the Capitol insurrection).

The challenge resides in identifying the right pathology. Finding one has no necessary allegiance to any existing class of disease—we’re free to cut and paste features of different diseases, even use our science-fiction mind to dream up one better fit to describe this unique blight.

The chimeric, hypothetical disease most like white nationalism resembles an infectious cancer—a rare class of diseases where malignant cells can be transmitted between people. The most famous of these is the devil tumour facial disease of Tasmanian devils. A grotesque illness typified by large tumors on the face that eventually spread throughout the body, killing the animal, the problem is so rampant it threatens the species with extinction.

Like an infectious cancer, white nationalism offers mutant, bastardized forms of American ideals and institutions like liberty, states’ rights, freedom of speech, and the right to bear arms. And they prey on and amplify existing white resentment, anti-Blackness, and xenophobia. And most frustratingly, these sentiments are allowed to grow and fester because of privilege: Law enforcement never treated white domestic terrorism as aggressively as it has Black radicals or international terrorists.

If Teachers Are A Fallen Professional Class, What Does That Make Diversity Trainers?

jeanettecespinoza |  I grew up in a predominately white suburb and as a child and teenager, I wasn’t immediately aware of the racism I was experiencing. On the surface, it appeared we were all on a level playing field. I lived next door to white people, had white friends, was a cheerleader along-side white girls, acted in plays with white people, and even had sleep-overs at white people’s homes. To me, I was welcomed into white spaces so my exposure to white supremacy was minimal.

But this bubble of protection was broken during my sophomore year when I began to reflect on my high school experience.

I was a cheerleader, but I was the only Black girl on the squad.

I was an actor, but the roles I played were designed for white characters.

I was invited to sleep-overs but was often either the only Black girl or one or two out of the fifteen or twenty girls in attendance.

Of the white friends I had, I could probably be counted as their only Black friend. While I knew many white people, for most of them I was their only exposure to someone of a different ethnic background on a regular basis.

The playing field was anything but level.

When this became evident to me, I approached our guidance counselor to ask about creating a Black studies group where Black students could come together and share experiences and white students could come to learn more about our culture and world views. The counselor, who was a white woman, welcomed my suggestions and offered to facilitate the group. I was beyond excited that we would be doing something to make a positive difference and couldn’t wait to get started.

But when the group began, only a few Black people showed up, and no white people came at all. It was great getting together with my Black friends to discuss our experiences, but this was something we did all the time when we got together. My objective was to help create a space where white people would begin to understand our stories and use their privilege to create more all-inclusive spaces, but there was zero desire to make this happen.

After one meeting, I stayed after to talk to the counselor about my frustration with the lack of white participation and her answer has stayed with me for decades:

“It’s a brave effort, Jeanette, but realistically, it's hard for white people to reckon with racial disparity. It’s a lot to ask young white people who have been sheltered from adversity to talk about the difficulties Black people have to deal with. Most probably aren’t equipped to deal with that much pain and trauma.”

Even as a fifteen-year-old I remember thinking if it's too much for them to just discuss it, what about those of us who have to deal with it and will experience it for the rest of our lives? That day it became clear to me that the feelings of white people took precedence over my actual pain and suffering, and at that moment, my innocence and open view of the world was forever compromised.

tressiemcphd Needs To Stop Spouting Anti-Racist Gibberish And Just Say What She Means

The article is almost incomprehensible. There’s an academic-style jargon at work about anti-racism that is so post-modern that it’s impossible to penetrate unless you’re reading the latest and greatest books about your own privilege.

Like a lot of post-modernist rhetoric posing as scientific, these passages could benefit from saying what they mean. It’s unreadable otherwise:

tressiemcphd |  These explicit white racial identities are kind of what we wanted to have happen. Only an explicit identity can be named and negotiated, ideally to better social outcomes. The confusion seems to be a latent belief that white racial identities are only progressive, that is that they get better as they are surfaced. Which, uh-oh. Nope. We are watching clashes of white racial identities, between explicit and implicit frames, worked out through implied loyalties of kinship and resource-sharing.

A poor woman on Twitter last night was crying in response to this similar story, from the Associated Press. It featured a series of gut-wrenching nut graphs like this one:

Democratic voter Rosanna Guadagno, 49, said her brother disowned her after she refused to support Trump four years ago. Last year her mother suffered a stroke, but her brother — who lived in the same California city as her mother — did not let her know when their mother died six months later. She was told the news after three days in an email from her sister-in-law.

I have been mildly surprised by their surprise, whether the shock is knowing that families are not infinitely resilient or that politics can matter more than kin, I’m not sure. I put together a string of thoughts on Twitter in response to one such story:

I have a 3/4 baked argument about what’s going on with these “a nation/family divided” stories. Maybe I should jot it down quickly.

— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) January 24, 2021

I want to focus a bit on the break-up with whiteness thing. I want to focus on that bit because I fear it has gotten lost in the recent racial awakening among white Americans. I am not being cute when I say that I do not know if the “how to be a better white person” genre of books, articles, reading groups, and self-help communities cover “the break-up”. I really do not know. I do not pay that genre a great deal of attention because I am not the audience. It is not, as I say, my ministry.

Despite not being my ministry, I do empathize with citizen-learners who are struggling with the course material. It is the pedagogue in me. If no one else has mentioned it (or, you missed that day in class), I want to be very clear: breaking up with whiteness is absolutely the end game of all anti-racist, humanist, post-racism work.

How Bout You Bust Down $2000.00 Stimulus Payments Instead Of Bullshitting

blackenterprise |   White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday it’s important that “our money … reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman’s image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that. So we’re exploring ways to speed up that effort.”

Former President Barack Obama initiated the effort during his second term in 2016, but the initiative froze during former President Donald Trump’s one term as he called the move “pure political correctness,” and suggested putting Tubman on the $2 bill. Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin added the change would not be made until after 2028.

Tubman, who was born into slavery sometime in the 1800s, eventually escaped to Pennsylvania in 1849 and went on to make 13 missions on the Underground Railroad to free more than 70 slaves. In order to do this, Tubman relied on a bevy of trusted people, both Black and white; disguises; and secret codes used in letters to others.

Tubman even carried a gun with her on missions to protect herself from slave catchers and to intimidate runaways who changed their minds about being freed, risking the safety of others.

In 2016, Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture told NPR what it would mean to see Tubman’s photo on a piece of U.S. currency.

“For me, having Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill really says, first of all, that America realizes that it’s not the same country that it once was — that it’s a place where diversity matters,” Bunch told All Things Considered. “And it allows us to make a hero out of someone like Harriet Tubman, who deserves to be a hero.”

Even Wokestan's Limp Wrist Straighted To Slap The Taste Out Of Cristina Beltran's Silly Mouth

medium  |  Fortunately, we people of colour can now follow Cristina’s leadership. Will she hand out “multiracial blackness” cards to white people who toe the line? Should the people of colour who voted for Trump wear a mark (perhaps a brand of some kind) so that we can identify and shun them? Does Cristina plan to distribute a list of acceptable opinions so that us poor, confused black folks don’t accidentally think something which costs us our blackness privileges? I can’t wait to learn more about how all of this works.

In the meantime, I’m just happy to see people of colour being infantilised and marginalised in this way. Surely we can all agree that the best way to treat those with differing opinions isn’t to focus on our common ground and try to understand each other but to discard them not only politically, but racially. By erasing the identity of everybody we disagree with, we can ensure that people of colour become the homogenous mass of groupthink Cristina imagines us to be.

Only one small shred of doubt remains. It’s true that I don’t understand how anybody, of any colour, believes Trump’s lies. I don’t understand why anybody would want him to represent America on the world stage. And I certainly don’t understand how anybody could be surprised that a president whose approval rating never made it above fifty percent and who presided over the deaths of more than 300,000 Americans during an election year, lost an election. But my first instinct when I come across these people isn’t to invalidate them.

Sure, sometimes it’s downright unpleasant to engage with people who think differently. It’s tempting to take refuge in the idea that we have nothing in common or that they’re hopelessly deranged. But if we find the courage and decency to talk in good faith, even the most repulsive people can surprise us.

Speaking of surprises, in a shocking turn of events (by which I mean a wholly predictable turn of events for anybody who’s noticed the trend of white guilt being twisted into deeper, more virulent strains of racism), Cristina is herself white*. And learning that she must automatically be invested in “a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others,” comes as a huge relief.

Because as revolutionary as the following statement might seem, I think people of colour should be able to disagree. I believe that the colour of your skin says nothing about the values and opinions you must hold. And while I wish that we could all get along, I’m willing to sit down and debate respectfully when we don’t. Because if I had to choose, I’d much rather deal with a person of colour who I disagree with than a white person who thinks we need to meet her standards to be who we are.

These Super-Accents When These Mexican Chicks Say "Names" Or "Latino" Though...,

NPR |   The chairman of the hate group The Proud Boys identifies as Afro-Cuban. One of the organizers of the pro-Trump extremist group Stop the Steal is Black and Arab. Christina Beltran is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. And she uses the term multiracial whiteness to explain why some groups who are disdained by white supremacists embrace white power movements. And she joins us now to explain. Welcome to the program.

CRISTINA BELTRAN: Great. Thank you so much for having me.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what do you mean by multiracial whiteness?

BELTRAN: So there's been a whole lot of people thinking and theorizing about white supremacy. And all of these scholars share a view that I share, that whiteness is not the same thing as white people and that whiteness is actually better understood as a political project that has emerged historically, and that is dynamic and that is always changing. And so whiteness as an ideology is rooted in America's history of white supremacy - right? - which has to do with the legacy of slavery or Indigenous dispossession or Jim Crow. And I think it's important to realize just how long in this country legal discrimination was not simply culturally acceptable but legally authorized. And so we've only been practicing a more consistent form of legal equality for a relatively short time since the 1960s. So Americans have often learned how to create their own sense of belonging through violence and through the exclusion of certain groups and populations.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what you're saying, essentially, is that people of other races and ethnicities want to benefit from white privilege by supporting it.

BELTRAN: Right.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So we should note that you wrote an op-ed recently in The Washington Post about this, and it stirred up a heated debate on social media. (laughter).

BELTRAN: Yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to read what you wrote in part. (Reading) For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one's racial identity as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to colorblind individualism.

Can you explain what you mean?

A Veritable Plague Of Brown White Supremacists..., (So Many Black Red Ants)

WaPo  | The Trump administration’s anti-immigration, anti-civil rights stance has made it easy to classify the president’s loyalists as a homogenous mob of white nationalists. But take a look at the FBI’s posters showing people wanted in the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol: Among the many White faces are a few that are clearly Latino or African American.

Such diversity highlights the fact that President Trump’s share of the Latino vote in November actually rose over 2016, notwithstanding years of incendiary rhetoric targeting Mexicans and other Latino communities. Yes, Trump’s voters — and his mob — are disproportionately White, but one of the more unsettling exit-poll data points of the 2020 election was that a quarter to a third of Latino voters voted to reelect Trump.

And while the vast majority of Latinos and an overwhelming majority of African American voters supported the Biden-Harris ticket and were crucial to its success, many Black and brown voters have family and friends who fervently backed the MAGA policy agenda, including its delusions and conspiracy theories.

One of the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” movement is Ali Alexander, a Trump supporter who identifies as Black and Arab. The chairman of the neo-fascist Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio, a Latino raised in Miami’s Little Havana who identifies as Afro-Cuban; when he arrived in Washington for the Jan. 6 march, he was arrested for allegedly burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church the month before.

What are we to make of Tarrio — and, more broadly, of Latino voters inspired by Trump? And what are we to make of unmistakably White mob violence that also includes non-White participants? I call this phenomenon multiracial whiteness — the promise that they, too, can lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.

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]

As Went Blackness So Went America's Elites

unherd |  The Left’s posture of liberationism provided an interpretive frame in which the deadly riots and wider explosion of urban crime in the 1960s was to be understood as political rather than criminal. This interpretation played a key role in the wider inversion: it is “society” that is revealed to be criminal. The utility of urban rioting for the new Left lay in the fact that it was thought to carry an insight into the illegitimacy of even our most minimum standards of behaviour. The moral authority of the black person, as victim, gave the bourgeoisie permission to withdraw its allegiance from the social order, just as black people were gaining fuller admittance to it.

Consider the images that had so impressed the nation in the 1950s and lead to the passage of civil rights legislation: marchers demanding equal treatment, and being willing to go to jail as a demonstration of this allegiance to the rule of law, impartially applied. The civil rights movement began as an attack on the injustice of double standards; it was a patriotic appeal to the common birthright of citizenship, as against the local sham democracy of the South. Notably, the civil rights activists of this time wore suits and ties, the costume of adult obligations and standards of comportment. But in a stunning reversal achieved by the new Left working in concert with the Black Power movement, Lasch points out, “the idea of a single standard was itself attacked as the crowning example of ‘institutional racism’.” Such standards were said to have no other purpose than keeping black people in their place. This shift was fundamental, for shared standards are what make for a democratic social order, as against the ancien régime of special privileges and exemptions.

For the new Left, then, it was not capitalism but the democratic social order altogether that was the source of oppression — not just of black people, or of workers, but of us, the college bourgeoisie. The civil rights movement of black Americans became the template for subsequent claims by women, gays and transgender persons, each based on a further discovery of moral failing buried deep in the heart of America. Hence a further license, indeed mandate, granted to individual conscience, as against the claims of the nation.

But the black experience retains a special role as the template that must be preserved. The black man is specially tuned by history to pick up the force field of oppression, which may be hard to discern in the more derivative cases that are built by analogy with his. Therefore, his condition serves a wider diagnostic and justificatory function. If it were to improve, denunciation of “society” would be awkward to maintain and, crucially, my own conscience would lose its self-certifying independence from the community. My wish to be free of the demands of society would look like mere selfishness.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. Somehow these free agents, ostensibly guided by individual conscience, have coalesced into something resembling a tribe, one that is greatly angered by rejection of its moral expertise.

 

Childish Public Meltdown Between Developmentally Arrested Nerds?

 BBC  | Do you think that Google would have treated you differently if you were a white man?

I have definitely been treated differently.

In all of the cases that I've seen in the past, they [Google] try so hard not to make it a headline.

They try so hard to make it smooth.

When it's some other person who is toxic, there are always these conversations about: "Oh, but you know, they're so valuable to the company, they're a genius, they're just socially awkward, et cetera."

My entire team is completely behind me and they're taking risks.

They're taking actual risks to stand behind me.

My manager is standing behind me.

And even still, they decided to treat me in this way.

So definitely, I feel like I've been treated differently.

I suppose if you think that, the next obvious question is do you think Google itself is institutionally racist?

Yes, Google itself is institutionally racist.

That's quite a thing to say - you were a Google employee until a short while ago.

I feel like most if not all tech companies are institutionally racist.

I mean, how can I not say that they are not institutionally racist?

The Congressional Black Caucus is the one who's forcing them to publish their diversity numbers.

It's not by accident that black women have one of the lowest retention rates[, in the technology industry].

So for sure Google and all of the other tech companies are institutionally racist.

 

Joseph Epstein Hurls Bricks Through Overton's Window

WaPo  |  The Wall Street Journal published a weekend op-ed that opened by addressing incoming first lady Jill Biden as “kiddo,” and argued she should drop the honorific “Dr.” from her name because she’s not a medical doctor.

The piece swiftly went viral, with critics bashing it as sexist and Northwestern University distancing the school from the lecturer emeritus who penned it. Dozens of Biden supporters, academics and activists hurled barbs at the newspaper’s opinion section on Saturday and Sunday with one Journal news reporter calling the piece “disgusting.”

“The @WSJ should be embarrassed to print the disgusting and sexist attack on @DrBiden running on the @WSJopinion page,” Michael LaRosa, a spokesman for Biden, said Saturday on Twitter. “If you had any respect for women at all you would remove this repugnant display of chauvinism from your paper and apologize to her.”

On Sunday, though, Paul A. Gigot, the editorial page editor and vice president of the Wall Street Journal, doubled down on the piece, calling the attacks a bad faith example of “cancel culture.”

“Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue?” he wrote in a letter to readers. “My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”

The rancorous debate this weekend echoed a much longer-running conversation about Biden’s use of an honorific, a discussion ongoing since she became second lady in 2009, two years after the community college professor earned her doctorate in education from the University of Delaware.

Joseph Epstein, who wrote the op-ed, taught English at Northwestern as an adjunct lecturer for three decades, but stopped teaching in 2003. He earned a bachelor of arts in absentia from the University of Chicago, and once received an honorary doctorate, but has no higher academic credentials.

He argued it is misleading for Biden to use the doctor title, at least while her husband is in the White House, because it is considered “bush league” in academic circles for nonmedical doctors to claim the honorific. Epstein also argued that an attachment to the title is silly because once-prestigious doctoral degrees have lost their value because of “the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards” at universities, in part because of an abundance of honorary doctorates like the one Epstein received.

Biden responded to the op-ed without addressing it directly on Sunday.

“Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished,” she said in a tweet.

Democrat Preznit Of U.S. Council Of Mayors Declared Racism A Public Health Crisis

Forbes |  An executive order signed by Mayor Greg Fischer on Tuesday declares racism a public health crisis in Louisville, Kentucky, with Fischer stating that several of the city's "systems are more than broken" and that they need to "be dismantled and replaced."

At a press conference announcing the executive order, Fischer said that the death of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed black woman who was shot and killed in her home by Louisville Metro police officers, made the city a "focal point for America's reckoning on racial justice." 

Fischer declared that for Louisville to move forward, it would first need to address the pain and root causes of racism, in addition to acknowledging its impact.

Under the order, seven specific areas will be targeted by the Louisville Metro Government: public safety, children and families, employment, Black wealth, housing, health and voting.

The order also calls for continuing to offer mail-in ballots for all elections.

Fischer pointed to several statistics Tuesday that highlighted the racial inequity in the city, such as the fact that Black residents own only 2.4% of Louisville's businesses, despite constituting 22.4% of the city's population.

Between some majority-Black and majority-white neighborhoods in Louisville, life expectancy can vary by as much as 12 years, according to the mayor. 

Crucial Quote: "For too many Louisvillians, racism is a fact of daily life, a fact that was created and documented in our country's laws and institutional policies like segregation, redlining, and urban renewal," Fischer said. "Laws and policies that restrict the freedom of all Americans to exercise their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

 

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

The World Economic Forum Is Where BLM's "Trained Marxist" National Leadership Goes

This is where BLM’s national leadership , including its “trained Marxists”, go. 

 

To global neoliberalism’s headquarters, to the World Economic forum, wherein is planned the 4iR and 4th Globalization. 

Bill Clinton crossed a picket line and Angela Davis has been promoting the WEF. Warren Buffet and other billionaire backers have been getting quite a return on their investment. Maybe BLM leadership is not as leftist as they claim. If they’re planning a WEF-backed revolution, what’s their “trained Marxist” plan? Using Marxist analysis to promote and excuse mass layoffs, gig economy work, and increasing monopoly power?

 

If the political/economic current system is good at nothing else, it is good at identifying who to co-opt, who to buy off, and who to marginalize. It’s the same way original black revolutionaries were co-opted into the afrodemic complex, and how civil rights negroes became reliable cogs in the DNC political machine. It’s how some Sixties firebrands were neutered into mild-mannered academics and DNC aparatchiks, while others were shuffled off into obscurity.

 

Much like the first conspirator to snitch on his comrades gets the best deal, the same holds true for aspiring sell-outs.

 

Question: is there even “a national BLM leadership”, with lines of authority and meetings and a board of directors and everything? 

usatoday |  “I’m really proud of the work we’ve been able to do in the last seven years,” Patrisse Cullors, co-founder and chairwoman of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, said in a statement. “What is clear is that Black Lives Matter shares a name with a much larger movement and there are literally hundreds of organizations that do impactful racial and gender justice work who make up the fabric of this broader movement.”

 

 The foundation has already identified several movement organizations that it would like to support, said Cullors, who declined to name the groups. The foundation says it will “prioritize mutual aid organizations, direct service and organizations focused on creating sustainable improvements in the material conditions for all black people.” It also looks to support black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender-led groups.

Over its nearly six years of existence, the BLM Global Network had received contributions from high-profile donors, including A-list entertainers such as Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Prince, who contributed to BLM mere weeks before his death in 2016. But unanswered questions of transparency and access to those gifts left some organizers in network affiliate chapters frustrated.

Adolph Reed: Elite Ratification Of Managerial "Authoriteh" Over The American Negroe Problem

thebaffler  |  The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own tactical alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by committed black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual black heroism and helps drive the intense—and myopic—opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on economic inequality and working-class concerns.

The striking hostility to such a politics within the higher reaches of antiracist activism illustrates the extent to which what bills itself as black politics today is in fact a class politics: it is not interested in the concerns of working people of whatever race or gender. Indeed, a spate of recent media reports have retailed evidence that upper-class black Americans may be experiencing stagnant-to-declining social mobility—which is taken as prima facie evidence of the stubbornly racist cast of the American social order: Even rich professionals like us, elite commentators suggest, are denied the right to secure our own class standing. It is also telling that the study that provoked the media reports – Raj Chetty, et al., “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” – rehearses the hoary recommendation that “reducing the intergenerational persistence of the black-white income gap will require policies whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.” These include “mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given area.” That’s pretty thin gruel, warmed over bromides and all too familiar paternalism and no actually redistributive policies at all.

In this context the pronounced animus trained on the figure of the “white savior” emerges as litmus test for the critical role of racial gatekeeper in respectable political discourse. The gatekeeping question has, for more than a century, focused on who speaks for black Americans and determines the “black agenda.” And the status of black leader, spokesperson, or “voice” has always been a direct function of contested class prerogative, dating back a century and more to Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. Specifically, the gatekeeping function is the obsession of the professional-managerial strata who pursue what Warren has described as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem.” How do “black leaders” become recognized? The answer is the same now as for Washington in the 1890s; recognition as a legitimate black leader, or “voice,” requires ratification by elite opinion-shaping institutions and individuals.

Gatekeeping hasn’t been the exclusive preoccupation of Bookerite conservatives or liberals like Du Bois. Even militant black nationalists and racial separatists like Marcus Garvey and the leaders of the Nation of Islam have pursued validation as black leaders from dominant white elites to support programs of racial “self-help” or uplift. From Black Power to Black Lives Matter, claimants to speak on behalf of the race have courted recognition from the Ford Foundation and other white-dominated nonprofit philanthropies and NGOs. And the emergence of cable news networks and the blogosphere have exponentially expanded the number and types of entities that can anoint race leaders and representative voices.

This new welter of platforms and voices seeking to promulgate and validate the acceptable terms of black leadership has made the category seem all the more beyond question, as black racial voices pop up all over the place all the time. So, for example, the self-proclaimed black voice Tia Oso was brought front and center in the 2015 Netroots Presidential Town Hall featuring Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, where she proclaimed that “black leadership must be foregrounded and central to progressive strategies.” Likewise, the presumed moral authority of race leadership enabled Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford to prevent Sanders from speaking at a Social Security rally in Seattle—as though the long-term viability of Social Security were not a black issue. The instant recourse to a posture of leadership is how random Black Lives Matter activists and a vast corps of pundits and bloggers are able to issue ex cathedra declarations about which issues are and are not pertinent to black Americans.

 

 

Timnit Gebru: Google Definitely Has A "Type" When It Comes To Diversity And Inclusion...,

technologyreview |  The paper, which builds off the work of other researchers, presents the history of natural-language processing, an overview of four main risks of large language models, and suggestions for further research. Since the conflict with Google seems to be over the risks, we’ve focused on summarizing those here.

Environmental and financial costs

Training large AI models consumes a lot of computer processing power, and hence a lot of electricity. Gebru and her coauthors refer to a 2019 paper from Emma Strubell and her collaborators on the carbon emissions and financial costs of large language models. It found that their energy consumption and carbon footprint have been exploding since 2017, as models have been fed more and more data.

Strubell’s study found that one language model with a particular type of “neural architecture search” (NAS) method would have produced the equivalent of 626,155 pounds (284 metric tons) of carbon dioxide—about the lifetime output of five average American cars. A version of Google’s language model, BERT, which underpins the company’s search engine, produced 1,438 pounds of CO2 equivalent in Strubell’s estimate—nearly the same as a roundtrip flight between New York City and San Francisco.

Gebru’s draft paper points out that the sheer resources required to build and sustain such large AI models means they tend to benefit wealthy organizations, while climate change hits marginalized communities hardest. “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental impact and inequitable access to resources,” they write.

Massive data, inscrutable models

Large language models are also trained on exponentially increasing amounts of text. This means researchers have sought to collect all the data they can from the internet, so there's a risk that racist, sexist, and otherwise abusive language ends up in the training data.

An AI model taught to view racist language as normal is obviously bad. The researchers, though, point out a couple of more subtle problems. One is that shifts in language play an important role in social change; the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have tried to establish a new anti-sexist and anti-racist vocabulary. An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms.

It will also fail to capture the language and the norms of countries and peoples that have less access to the internet and thus a smaller linguistic footprint online. The result is that AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities.

Moreover, because the training datasets are so large, it’s hard to audit them to check for these embedded biases. “A methodology that relies on datasets too large to document is therefore inherently risky,” the researchers conclude. “While documentation allows for potential accountability, [...] undocumented training data perpetuates harm without recourse.”

Research opportunity costs

The researchers summarize the third challenge as the risk of “misdirected research effort.” Though most AI researchers acknowledge that large language models don’t actually understand language and are merely excellent at manipulating it, Big Tech can make money from models that manipulate language more accurately, so it keeps investing in them. “This research effort brings with it an opportunity cost,” Gebru and her colleagues write. Not as much effort goes into working on AI models that might achieve understanding, or that achieve good results with smaller, more carefully curated datasets (and thus also use less energy).

Illusions of meaning

The final problem with large language models, the researchers say, is that because they’re so good at mimicking real human language, it’s easy to use them to fool people. There have been a few high-profile cases, such as the college student who churned out AI-generated self-help and productivity advice on a blog, which went viral.

The dangers are obvious: AI models could be used to generate misinformation about an election or the covid-19 pandemic, for instance. They can also go wrong inadvertently when used for machine translation. The researchers bring up an example: In 2017, Facebook mistranslated a Palestinian man’s post, which said “good morning” in Arabic, as “attack them” in Hebrew, leading to his arrest.