Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
I'm also not sure why you bring up the origin of policing like policing in 2020 is modeled on anything remotely similar to the slave-catching enterprises.
There are many similarities in the dynamics between slave, slave-catcher, slave-owner and forced prison labor, police, and the prison industry.
That's part of why I suggested we look at what constitutes 'crime' in the slave dynamic. You acknowledge the drug war is absurd, you know people were incarcerated en masse (disproportionately BIPoC), forced to labor for little or no compensation, and face deplorable working and living conditions.
You see that the police act as both an enforcement and acquisition arm of this industry of forced laborers under unreasonable legal structures. Also that this forced/coerced labor is often used to subsidize government affairs. You see the complete lack of accountability for these actors and the simultaneous justification for their actions under the auspicious of legality and justice within this framework.
It was probably a rhetorical curiosity, but I thought it worth explaining a bit more.
See, while those things are true, you believe that's the impetus for the apparatus, whereas I do not. We have drug laws not to build a slave labor force, but because of puritanical ideas and false notions of external "harm". Police are not instituted to corral folks for forced labor encampments. They're primarily there as Government enforcement arms to protect the State and they provide enough relevant services (legitimate tasks of security, crime solving, etc. even if they're bad at it) to not be so transparent to the mass of people. That's why I say police of today are nothing like the slave-catchers of yore. They're fundamentally different on most axis.
Even snopes says...not so fast on your assertions. Relevant quote cited:
It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States. In 1838, the city of Boston established the first American police force, followed by New York City in 1845, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Philadelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ and Baltimore in 1857 (Harring 1983, Lundman 1980; Lynch 1984). By the 1880s all major U.S. cities had municipal police forces in place.
Not exactly the hubs of slave-catchers. Regardless, I am interested if you believe that gun control advocates and laws are racist today? (Using the same argument for why police today are the same as police in yesteryear according to your chain of logic)
There's more to "the impetus for the apparatus" than just that, but the specifics are related to the relevant material conditions. Even the snopes piece goes on to note this and I have referenced the nature of policing in the north (since capital was less explicitly linked to chattel slavery) repeatedly.
Centralized and bureaucratic police departments, focusing on the alleged crime-producing qualities of the “dangerous classes” began to emphasize preventative crime control....
Patrols in the northern U.S. also became useful for breaking up labor strikes before they became too destructive (Marxist political historian Eric Hobsbawm referred to the mechanisms of violence and destruction of property to agitate for better working conditions as “collective bargaining by riot”) and these services became increasingly utilized as the country became more populated and conditions simultaneously grew more difficult for the United States’ restive economic underclasses.
I wouldn't say the police of today are the same as 150+ years ago, but I did point several similarities in the dynamics at play I think relevant to examining how we determine what constitutes "crime" and "justice" as well as the role of police in those concepts.
Before entertaining the rest, I have to ask, who do you think the government/state represents?
Itself and tax-leeches of all varieties, but you haven't answered my question yet. As for crime there's no point in talking about this as we're about as far apart as one can be (a market anarchist who holds steadfast Lockean ideals and a Marxist lol).
I'm curious who these "tax-leechers" are. There also seems to be a theme of "motivated and acting out of self(ish) interests" through the entities you're critical of. Presumably this is also present among/between market anarchists?
By the way, it's my political lineage that first introduced class theory (rightful I might add, not the Marxist interpretation). Comte, Dunoyer, Constant into Thierry and Blanqui. Hence, this is my scaffolding for who the State is and serves.
I'll look into these to get a better understanding of your worldview.
As to your question, definitely in the 60's, again in the 80's, and yeah, in the 90's/early 2000's. Gun control advocates are probably progressively less racist/racially motivated in their advocacy each generation. Especially since the most recent efforts are primarily motivated by school shootings and other mass shootings perpetrated by white people.
On the other hand, stop and frisk was especially racist and often justified by arguing it prevented gun crime. Which also speaks to another important aspect about the distance we often find between laws as written and laws as they are enforced (and the related classification of acts as crimes or justified).
EDIT: Having read a bit I think I'm understanding some of the key differences in our worldviews specifically regarding class. I'm curious, are there some popular examples of what I might lump together as capitalists and you would delineate into the honorable entrepreneur and the exploitative plunderer/idle rich?
For instance; Bezos, Gates, Musk, entrepreneurs or plunderers?
Yes, stop and frisk was particularly egregrious violation of our liberty throwing on its head presumed innocence or any semblance of "reasonableness" with regards to 4th Amendment search and seizure. That lovely progressive NYC, gotta love them. Moving on....
I think all 3 of those to some extent are plunderers (I consider IP an infringement on property rights; see the work of Stephen Kinsella and Wendy McElroy), but Musk is the worst of the 3 with vast array of State-subsidies. They all though, provide a wealth of positive services. So it's not just a binary yes/no. To the extent possible it would be great to abolish their state-subsidies and regulatory advantages. You can read about the works of Gabriel Kolko on the Progressive Era and the build up of the bureaucratic state at the behest of Industrial tycoons who wished to destroy their competition through the regulatory state (of which they did with their patsies in the progressive movement). That is to say, I believe that in a fully market society large entities like Amazon, Microsoft, etc. would be rarer given the ease of competition and lack of a system of societal coercion to control to destroy their competition. It's why I think in the long-run market societies are incompatible with the state because a large percentage of society whether it is the common people or the industrialists will leech themselves off the backs of the productive destroying the liberal society.
Without a State, what provides accountability for those that violate the nature of the organizing principles of this market society?
Doesn't this make a market society both dependent on and incompatible with a State?
The question of law, security, and justice is difficult to distill on a forum. I tend to think in practical application it would look more city-state like than anything else, but competing firms offering their services within a primarily libertarian ethical framework. Let me define what I mean by competing - not between the firms with monopolistic powers in a geographical territory, but of individual consent (and yes, there would be "outlaws" those who choose no system of justice/law) in the marketplace with of course associated remuneration for services rendered (a much greater incentive to not abuse the individual when they can choose providers). I, of course realize that not everyone or every firm will be libertarian, and generally that's fine, if you want to ascribe to a theologically driven society, go ahead, you want your worker ran co-ops and marxist legalism, sure, but with regards to conflict the smaller the polity the more generally war-adverse they are (with stronger adherence to free-trade principles; see small territories and states around the world now e.g. Singapore, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, etc.). Potentially some forms of arbitration and defensive applications will arise I suspect. I think some of the better work is from Bruce Benson when it comes to law and justice.
I'm also not sure why you bring up the origin of policing like policing in 2020 is modeled on anything remotely similar to the slave-catching enterprises.
There are many similarities in the dynamics between slave, slave-catcher, slave-owner and forced prison labor, police, and the prison industry.
That's part of why I suggested we look at what constitutes 'crime' in the slave dynamic. You acknowledge the drug war is absurd, you know people were incarcerated en masse (disproportionately BIPoC), forced to labor for little or no compensation, and face deplorable working and living conditions.
You see that the police act as both an enforcement and acquisition arm of this industry of forced laborers under unreasonable legal structures. Also that this forced/coerced labor is often used to subsidize government affairs. You see the complete lack of accountability for these actors and the simultaneous justification for their actions under the auspicious of legality and justice within this framework.
It was probably a rhetorical curiosity, but I thought it worth explaining a bit more.
See, while those things are true, you believe that's the impetus for the apparatus, whereas I do not. We have drug laws not to build a slave labor force, but because of puritanical ideas and false notions of external "harm". Police are not instituted to corral folks for forced labor encampments. They're primarily there as Government enforcement arms to protect the State and they provide enough relevant services (legitimate tasks of security, crime solving, etc. even if they're bad at it) to not be so transparent to the mass of people. That's why I say police of today are nothing like the slave-catchers of yore. They're fundamentally different on most axis.
Even snopes says...not so fast on your assertions. Relevant quote cited:
It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States. In 1838, the city of Boston established the first American police force, followed by New York City in 1845, Albany, NY and Chicago in 1851, New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853, Philadelphia in 1855, and Newark, NJ and Baltimore in 1857 (Harring 1983, Lundman 1980; Lynch 1984). By the 1880s all major U.S. cities had municipal police forces in place.
Not exactly the hubs of slave-catchers. Regardless, I am interested if you believe that gun control advocates and laws are racist today? (Using the same argument for why police today are the same as police in yesteryear according to your chain of logic)
There's more to "the impetus for the apparatus" than just that, but the specifics are related to the relevant material conditions. Even the snopes piece goes on to note this and I have referenced the nature of policing in the north (since capital was less explicitly linked to chattel slavery) repeatedly.
Centralized and bureaucratic police departments, focusing on the alleged crime-producing qualities of the “dangerous classes” began to emphasize preventative crime control....
Patrols in the northern U.S. also became useful for breaking up labor strikes before they became too destructive (Marxist political historian Eric Hobsbawm referred to the mechanisms of violence and destruction of property to agitate for better working conditions as “collective bargaining by riot”) and these services became increasingly utilized as the country became more populated and conditions simultaneously grew more difficult for the United States’ restive economic underclasses.
I wouldn't say the police of today are the same as 150+ years ago, but I did point several similarities in the dynamics at play I think relevant to examining how we determine what constitutes "crime" and "justice" as well as the role of police in those concepts.
Before entertaining the rest, I have to ask, who do you think the government/state represents?
Itself and tax-leeches of all varieties, but you haven't answered my question yet. As for crime there's no point in talking about this as we're about as far apart as one can be (a market anarchist who holds steadfast Lockean ideals and a Marxist lol).
I'm curious who these "tax-leechers" are. There also seems to be a theme of "motivated and acting out of self(ish) interests" through the entities you're critical of. Presumably this is also present among/between market anarchists?
By the way, it's my political lineage that first introduced class theory (rightful I might add, not the Marxist interpretation). Comte, Dunoyer, Constant into Thierry and Blanqui. Hence, this is my scaffolding for who the State is and serves.
I'll look into these to get a better understanding of your worldview.
As to your question, definitely in the 60's, again in the 80's, and yeah, in the 90's/early 2000's. Gun control advocates are probably progressively less racist/racially motivated in their advocacy each generation. Especially since the most recent efforts are primarily motivated by school shootings and other mass shootings perpetrated by white people.
On the other hand, stop and frisk was especially racist and often justified by arguing it prevented gun crime. Which also speaks to another important aspect about the distance we often find between laws as written and laws as they are enforced (and the related classification of acts as crimes or justified).
EDIT: Having read a bit I think I'm understanding some of the key differences in our worldviews specifically regarding class. I'm curious, are there some popular examples of what I might lump together as capitalists and you would delineate into the honorable entrepreneur and the exploitative plunderer/idle rich?
For instance; Bezos, Gates, Musk, entrepreneurs or plunderers?
Yes, stop and frisk was particularly egregrious violation of our liberty throwing on its head presumed innocence or any semblance of "reasonableness" with regards to 4th Amendment search and seizure. That lovely progressive NYC, gotta love them. Moving on....
I think all 3 of those to some extent are plunderers (I consider IP an infringement on property rights; see the work of Stephen Kinsella and Wendy McElroy), but Musk is the worst of the 3 with vast array of State-subsidies. They all though, provide a wealth of positive services. So it's not just a binary yes/no. To the extent possible it would be great to abolish their state-subsidies and regulatory advantages. You can read about the works of Gabriel Kolko on the Progressive Era and the build up of the bureaucratic state at the behest of Industrial tycoons who wished to destroy their competition through the regulatory state (of which they did with their patsies in the progressive movement). That is to say, I believe that in a fully market society large entities like Amazon, Microsoft, etc. would be rarer given the ease of competition and lack of a system of societal coercion to control to destroy their competition. It's why I think in the long-run market societies are incompatible with the state because a large percentage of society whether it is the common people or the industrialists will leech themselves off the backs of the productive destroying the liberal society.
Without a State, what provides accountability for those that violate the nature of the organizing principles of this market society?
Doesn't this make a market society both dependent on and incompatible with a State?
The question of law, security, and justice is difficult to distill on a forum. I tend to think in practical application it would look more city-state like than anything else, but competing firms offering their services within a primarily libertarian ethical framework. Let me define what I mean by competing - not between the firms with monopolistic powers in a geographical territory, but of individual consent (and yes, there would be "outlaws" those who choose no system of justice/law) in the marketplace with of course associated remuneration for services rendered (a much greater incentive to not abuse the individual when they can choose providers). I, of course realize that not everyone or every firm will be libertarian, and generally that's fine, if you want to ascribe to a theologically driven society, go ahead, you want your worker ran co-ops and marxist legalism, sure, but with regards to conflict the smaller the polity the more generally war-adverse they are (with stronger adherence to free-trade principles; see small territories and states around the world now e.g. Singapore, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, etc.). Potentially some forms of arbitration and defensive applications will arise I suspect. I think some of the better work is from Bruce Benson when it comes to law and justice.
I certainly think that it won't be perfect, but it would be better than any State-run society.
Made an edit to your PS, but about 10 minutes in and I'm terribly curious about your interpretation of/thoughts on customary vs authoritarian law in regards to the slavery illustration.
EDIT: It seems this might have a somewhat romanticized view of the "wild west" so I feel like there's fertile ground to be explored there.
I think it's going to be important to investigate the relationship between folks like Bezos, Gates, and Musk and the government. We both identify it as parasitic, and seem to see the state as an outgrowth of capitalist class interest in securing their stolen surplus value and the police as the enforcers domestically and military internationally of this exploitative and plunderous relationship with a culturally implied and legally supported legitimacy.
That's not my view (the state as an outgrowth), rather the State is the progenitor (Franz Oppenheimer work here is great).
In the 1920s Der Staat was a widely read and heatedly discussed book. It was translated into English, French, Hungarian, Serbian, Japanese, Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian and has been influential among libertarians, communitarians and anarchists.[2][3]
Unlike Locke and others, Oppenheimer rejected the idea of the "social contract" and contributed to the "conquest theory of the state", heavily influenced by the earlier sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz and his intertribal, intergroup competition, "race-conflict" (Rassenkampf) theories of the sociological genealogy of the state:
The State, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors. No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner. Wherever a reliable tradition reports otherwise, either it concerns the amalgamation of two fully developed primitive states into one body of more complete organisation, or else it is an adaptation to men of the fable of the sheep which made a bear their king in order to be protected against the wolf. But even in this latter case, the form and content of the State became precisely the same as in those states where nothing intervened, and which became immediately 'wolf states' (p. 15)
I think "investigating" their relationship is not too relevant, rather, abolishing forms of state-parasitism is. The rest will fall into place. By the way, my view is not solely on the functionaries of enterprise, but of all tax-leeches, the welfarism, entitlements, regulatory schema's and regimes, the bureaucratic parasites, etc. To me, it's more important to provide an environment where production, creation, and consumption is maximized through property rights to best fulfill individual needs and wants. Now, insofar as what to do with the plundered wealth, that gets a bit trickier. It's hard to exactly determine the scale and who were the aggrieved parties, etc. If it can be fairly well documented to such an extent something like sale and distribution to affected parties similar to a class-action lawsuit, perhaps abandonment and return to original homesteading, etc. I tend to think it best to destroy the systems in place and then let the market correct itself (perhaps with repayment of subsidies to taxPAYERS, but other stuff like bureaucratic advantages is far too hard to place monetary value on).
Made an edit to your PS, but about 10 minutes in and I'm terribly curious about your interpretation of/thoughts on customary vs authoritarian law in regards to the slavery illustration.
EDIT: It seems this might have a somewhat romanticized view of the "wild west" so I feel like there's fertile ground to be explored there.
I'll get back with you on that as its getting late where I am, but the wild west, contrary to popular belief was not so wild. In fact, compared to today there was far less crime and was much more market oriented. Anderson/Hill out of Montana State/Wheaton Uni, did splendid work on this subject with the best data available.
Despite the above caveats, the West is a useful testing ground for several of the specific hypotheses about how anarchocapitalism might work. We use David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom as our basis for the formulation of hypotheses about the working of anarchocapitalism, because it is decidedly nonutopian and it does set out, in a fairly specific form, the actual mechanisms under which a system of nongovernment protective agencies would operate. The major propositions are:
Anarchocapitalism is not chaos. Property rights will be protected and civil order will prevail.
Private agencies will provide the necessary functions for preservation of an orderly society.
Private protection agencies will soon discover that "warfare" is a costly way of resolving disputes and lower-cost methods of settlement (arbitration, courts, etc.) will result.
The concept of "justice" is not an immutable one that only needs to be discovered. Preferences do vary across individuals as to the rules they prefer to live under and the price they are willing to pay for such rules. Therefore, significant differences in rules might exist in various societies under anarchocapitalism.
There are not significant enough economies of scale in crime so that major "mafia" organizations evolve and dominate society.
Competition among protective agencies and adjudication bodies will serve as healthy checks on undesirable behavior.
Consumers will have better information than under government and will use it in judging these agencies.
I am sure you will enjoy this section (as I do).
In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, "nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870.In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings."14 Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had 5 killings in any one year.15 Frank Prassel states in his book subtitled A Legacy of Law and Order, that "if any conclusion can be drawn from recent crime statistics, it must be that this last frontier left no significant heritage of offenses against the person, relative to other sections of the country."16
I think it's going to be important to investigate the relationship between folks like Bezos, Gates, and Musk and the government. We both identify it as parasitic, and seem to see the state as an outgrowth of capitalist class interest in securing their stolen surplus value and the police as the enforcers domestically and military internationally of this exploitative and plunderous relationship with a culturally implied and legally supported legitimacy.
That's not my view (the state as an outgrowth), rather the State is the progenitor (Franz Oppenheimer work here is great).
In the 1920s Der Staat was a widely read and heatedly discussed book. It was translated into English, French, Hungarian, Serbian, Japanese, Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian and has been influential among libertarians, communitarians and anarchists.[2][3]
Unlike Locke and others, Oppenheimer rejected the idea of the "social contract" and contributed to the "conquest theory of the state", heavily influenced by the earlier sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz and his intertribal, intergroup competition, "race-conflict" (Rassenkampf) theories of the sociological genealogy of the state:
The State, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stages of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors. No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner. Wherever a reliable tradition reports otherwise, either it concerns the amalgamation of two fully developed primitive states into one body of more complete organisation, or else it is an adaptation to men of the fable of the sheep which made a bear their king in order to be protected against the wolf. But even in this latter case, the form and content of the State became precisely the same as in those states where nothing intervened, and which became immediately 'wolf states' (p. 15)
I think "investigating" their relationship is not too relevant, rather, abolishing forms of state-parasitism is. The rest will fall into place. By the way, my view is not solely on the functionaries of enterprise, but of all tax-leeches, the welfarism, entitlements, regulatory schema's and regimes, the bureaucratic parasites, etc. To me, it's more important to provide an environment where production, creation, and consumption is maximized through property rights to best fulfill individual needs and wants. Now, insofar as what to do with the plundered wealth, that gets a bit trickier. It's hard to exactly determine the scale and who were the aggrieved parties, etc. If it can be fairly well documented to such an extent something like sale and distribution to affected parties similar to a class-action lawsuit, perhaps abandonment and return to original homesteading, etc. I tend to think it best to destroy the systems in place and then let the market correct itself (perhaps with repayment of subsidies to taxPAYERS, but other stuff like bureaucratic advantages is far too hard to place monetary value on).
I suppose that somewhat depends on the influence of law from England between the tithe court system and kings justice one assigns to the formation of law in the primordial US. As well as the distinctions between the interests and overlaps between the kings court (influential nobles) and tithe courts (powerful merchants and influential public figures of non-noble blood).
The formation of the US was in many ways about supplanting the king with a "national" tithe system (that certain people were excluded form through both customary and authoritarian law) supplemented with a more localized or city-state version at the state level.
As I see it, many of the political disputes of the founders can be seen through this framing as: how the concepts of noble blood could be replicated through a meritocracy dependent on maintaining a new signifier of legitimacy in the face of contrary evidence (bad nobles justified their position through blood/sexism, bad entrepreneurs through racism/sexism).
If your enterprise is dependent on slave labor (or poverty wages), it probably isn't a very productive enterprise (or someone is plundering a lot of surplus value and between owner and slave it's clear who pays the price).
Much of the conflict in the US (namely the civil war) has been centered around this internal contradiction. The founders came to be free of an arbitary king State but sought to maintain the arbitrary exploitative system while ostensibly opening up the "noble club" to a limited subsections of "entrepreneurs".
We agree the government now acts in the interests of itself and those rent-seeking plunderers. I think the main issue may be: what prevents an ambitious entrepreneurs from logically pursuing to establish first a tithe court, and then a network of tithe courts that invariably are practically indistinguishable from our current republic except without stuff like ending slavery, imposing voting rights, and other federal endeavors?
Which is to say don't we just end up with a slightly more (a King had his court to please) widely distributed "king' and an arbitrary meritocracy replacing nobility (the Gates and Bezos types)? Also is this just a ideological fantasy utopia thing or is there a reset of sorts to deal with the Musk's of the world or is it a slow democratic evolution that ushers in an ideal market society?
On July 11 2020 22:51 GreenHorizons wrote: We're not even close to the solutions part of abolishing the police.
That's not how it sounded a couple of weeks ago. You recently supported the idea that any police officer should be fired on the spot with his pension withdrawn if he were so much as accused, even without proof, of excessive violence. When I pointed out that criminals could use that to extort the police you answered:
On June 09 2020 06:33 GreenHorizons wrote: Just as a matter of clarification there's a lot of cooption taking place on what is actually being called for. Now there's a lot of liberal and 'progressive' folks all over the chart but a brief synopsis of what "Defund the police" means can be found here:
Reject any proposed expansion to police budgets.
Prohibit private-public innovation schemes that profit from temporary technological fixes to systemic problems of police abuse and violence. These contracts and data-sharing arrangements, however profitable for technologists and reformists, are lethal.
Reduce the power of police unions.
Until the police are fully defunded, make police union contract negotiations public.
Pressure the AFL-CIO to denounce police unions.
Prohibit city candidates taking money from police unions and stop accepting union funds.
Withhold pensions and don’t rehire cops involved in use of excessive force.
Demand the highest budget cuts per year, until they slash police budget to zero.
Slash police salaries across the board until they are zeroed out.
Immediately fire police officers who have any excessive force complaints.
No hiring of new officers or replacement of fired or resigned officers.
Fully cut funding for public relations.
Suspend the use of paid administrative leave for cops under investigation.
Require police, not cities, to be liable for misconduct and violence settlements.
It's a good hub for a lot of other useful information about related movements as well.
Doritos Deray put out a more centrist version and tacked on the word "abolish" later but that's just sheepdog shit imo.
So if I understand that list of demands right, a police who gets accused of excessive violence should be fired and his pension should be withdrawn, without the need to provide any kind of proof of the accusation? I wonder how organized criminals could use that as a way of extorting cops...
I'm personally not worried about how cops use it against each other.
Bari Weiss has resigned from the NYT, alleging a campaign of bullying. I personally found her extremely annoying, but I don't think she was nearly the worst problem at the NYT (that would be bedbug of great renown, Bret Stephens, along with Judith Miller ever having been employed).
I found her annoying due to a combination of her victim complex, proclamations to not be right wing, and some pseudo-intellectual garbage terminology ("Intellectual dark web"). She's not a centrist, as she continually proclaimed herself to be. Her characterizations of the facts could also be really loose at times. However, if her work had been subject to heavier fact checking I'm not sure I'd really have found her work to be objectionable (her twitter was generally bad, but the same can be said for most high profile twitter users at the times).
The issue wasn't Bari Weiss, it was a paper publishing glowing profiles of open nazis, op-eds that they hadn't read, and editors that don't seem to want to do their job. While I think she brought some of this on herself, she was encouraged to do so by editors at the paper who weren't willing to defend her, which is a special kind of cowardice.
From her resignation letter -
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.
That resignation letter is amazing. I'm not a fan of her personally but anyone that calls out NYT on their dirty laundry I can definitely get behind.
I remember I first heard of her when she was on Joe Rogan's podcast a year or two ago, I was amazed that a NYT reporter would even agree to be on with him.
On July 15 2020 01:08 Nevuk wrote: Bari Weiss has resigned from the NYT, alleging a campaign of bullying. I personally found her extremely annoying, but I don't think she was nearly the worst problem at the NYT (that would be bedbug of great renown, Bret Stephens, along with Judith Miller ever having been employed).
I found her annoying due to a combination of her victim complex, proclamations to not be right wing, and some pseudo-intellectual garbage terminology ("Intellectual dark web"). She's not a centrist, as she continually proclaimed herself to be. Her characterizations of the facts could also be really loose at times. However, if her work had been subject to heavier fact checking I'm not sure I'd really have found her work to be objectionable (her twitter was generally bad, but the same can be said for most high profile twitter users at the times).
The issue wasn't Bari Weiss, it was a paper publishing glowing profiles of open nazis, op-eds that they hadn't read, and editors that don't seem to want to do their job. While I think she brought some of this on herself, she was encouraged to do so by editors at the paper who weren't willing to defend her, which is a special kind of cowardice.
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.
She didn't coin the "pseudo-intellectual garbage terminology," she just used what somebody else had already called it. It had been used on Joe Rogan podcast and others before her. So I don't really think she had abundant editorial latitude to relabel a group of ... I guess primarily lefties questioning current dialogue and academia ... after over a million people had already had that particular description used.
The NYT is on a bad slide. It's such a shame. But hey, free market and all, they have the right to go in that direction and please a readership with certain ideas about conversations that shouldn't be had.
Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”
I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.
Today, people like them who dare venture into this “There Be Dragons” territory on the intellectual map have met with outrage and derision — even, or perhaps especially, from people who pride themselves on openness.
It’s a pattern that has become common in our new era of That Which Cannot Be Said. And it is the reason the Intellectual Dark Web, a term coined half-jokingly by Mr. Weinstein, came to exist.
What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.
Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.
The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.
The core members have little in common politically. Bret and Eric Weinstein and Ms. Heying were Bernie Sanders supporters. Mr. Harris was an outspoken Hillary voter. Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trump conservative.
But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.
“People are starved for controversial opinions,” said Joe Rogan, an MMA color commentator and comedian who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the country. “And they are starved for an actual conversation.”
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That hunger has translated into a booming and, in many cases, profitable market. Episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which have featured many members of the I.D.W., can draw nearly as big an audience as Rachel Maddow. A recent episode featuring Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying talking about gender, hotness, beauty and #MeToo was viewed on YouTube over a million times, even though the conversation lasted for nearly three hours.
Ben Shapiro’s podcast, which airs five days a week, gets 15 million downloads a month. Sam Harris estimates that his “Waking Up” podcast gets one million listeners an episode. Dave Rubin’s YouTube show has more than 700,000 subscribers.
Offline and in the real world, members of the I.D.W. are often found speaking to one another in packed venues around the globe. In July, for example, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray and Mr. Harris will appear together at the O2 Arena in London.
But as the members of the Intellectual Dark Web become genuinely popular, they are also coming under more scrutiny. On April 21, Kanye West crystallized this problem when he tweeted seven words that set Twitter on fire: “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”
Candace Owens, the communications director for Turning Point USA, is a sharp, young, black conservative — a telegenic speaker with killer instincts who makes videos with titles like “How to Escape the Democrat Plantation” and “The Left Thinks Black People Are Stupid.” Mr. West’s praise for her was sandwiched inside a longer thread that referenced many of the markers of the Intellectual Dark Web, like the tyranny of thought policing and the importance of independent thinking. He was photographed watching a Jordan Peterson video.
All of a sudden, it seemed, the I.D.W. had broken through to the culture-making class, and a few in the group flirted with embracing Ms. Owens as their own.
Yet Ms. Owens is a passionate Trump supporter who has dismissed racism as a threat to black people while arguing, despite evidence to the contrary, that immigrants steal their jobs. She has also compared Jay-Z and Beyoncé to slaves for supporting the Democratic Party.
Many others in the I.D.W. were made nervous by her sudden ascendance to the limelight, seeing Ms. Owens not as a sincere intellectual but as a provocateur in the mold of Milo Yiannopoulos. For the I.D.W. to succeed, they argue, it needs to eschew those interested in violating taboo for its own sake.
“I’m really only interested in building this intellectual movement,” Eric Weinstein said. “The I.D.W. has bigger goals than anyone’s buzz or celebrity.”
And yet, when Ms. Owens and Charlie Kirk, the executive director of Turning Point USA, met last week with Mr. West at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, just outside of the frame — in fact, avoiding the photographers — was Mr. Weinstein. He attended both that meeting and a one-on-one the next day for several hours at the mogul’s request. Mr. Weinstein, who can’t name two of Mr. West’s songs, said he found the Kardashian spouse “kind and surprisingly humble despite his unpredictable public provocations.” He has also tweeted that he’s interested to see what Ms. Owens says next.
This episode was the clearest example yet of the challenge this group faces: In their eagerness to gain popular traction, are the members of the I.D.W. aligning themselves with people whose views and methods are poisonous? Could the intellectual wildness that made this alliance of heretics worth paying attention to become its undoing?
There is no direct route into the Intellectual Dark Web. But the quickest path is to demonstrate that you aren’t afraid to confront your own tribe.
The metaphors for this experience vary: going through the phantom tollbooth; deviating from the narrative; falling into the rabbit hole. But almost everyone can point to a particular episode where they came in as one thing and emerged as something quite different.
A year ago, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were respected tenured professors at Evergreen State College, where their Occupy Wall Street-sympathetic politics were well in tune with the school’s progressive ethos. Today they have left their jobs, lost many of their friends and endangered their reputations.
All this because they opposed a “Day of Absence,” in which white students were asked to leave campus for the day. For questioning a day of racial segregation cloaked in progressivism, the pair was smeared as racist. Following threats, they left town for a time with their children and ultimately resigned their jobs.
“Nobody else reacted. That’s what shocked me,” Mr. Weinstein said. “It told me that a culture that told itself it was radically open-minded was actually a culture cowed by fear.”
Sam Harris says his moment came in 2006, at a conference at the Salk Institute with Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson and other prominent scientists. Mr. Harris said something that he thought was obvious on its face: Not all cultures are equally conducive to human flourishing. Some are superior to others.
“Until that time I had been criticizing religion, so the people who hated what I had to say were mostly on the right,” Mr. Harris said. “This was the first time I fully understood that I had an equivalent problem with the secular left.”
After his talk, in which he disparaged the Taliban, a biologist who would go on to serve on President Barack Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues approached him. “I remember she said: ‘That’s just your opinion. How can you say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?’ But to me it’s just obvious that forcing women to live their lives inside bags is wrong. I gave her another example: What if we found a culture that was ritually blinding every third child? And she actually said, ‘It would depend on why they were doing it.’” His jaw, he said, “actually fell open.”
“The moral confusion that operates under the banner of ‘multiculturalism’ can blind even well-educated people to the problems of intolerance and cruelty in other communities,” Mr. Harris said. “This had never fully crystallized for me until that moment.”
Before September 2016, Jordan Peterson was an obscure psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Then he spoke out against Canada’s Bill C-16, which proposed amending the country’s human-rights act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and expression. He resisted on the grounds that the bill risked curtailing free speech by compelling people to use alternative gender pronouns. He made YouTube videos about it. He went on news shows to protest it. He confronted protesters calling him a bigot. When the university asked him to stop talking about it, including sending two warning letters, he refused.
While most people in the group faced down comrades on the political left, Ben Shapiro confronted the right. He left his job as editor at large of Breitbart News two years ago because he believed it had become, under Steve Bannon’s leadership, “Trump’s personal Pravda.” In short order, he became a primary target of the alt-right and, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the No. 1 target of anti-Semitic tweets during the presidential election.
Other figures in the I.D.W., like Claire Lehmann, the founder and editor of the online magazine Quillette, and Debra Soh, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, self-deported from the academic track, sensing that the spectrum of acceptable perspectives and even areas of research was narrowing. Dr. Soh said that she started “waking up” in the last two years of her doctorate program. “It was clear that the environment was inhospitable to conducting research,” she said. “If you produce findings that the public doesn’t like, you can lose your job.”
When she wrote an op-ed in 2015 titled “Why Transgender Kids Should Wait to Transition,” citing research that found that a majority of gender dysphoric children outgrow their dysphoria, she said her colleagues warned her, “Even if you stay in academia and express this view, tenure won’t protect you.”
Nowadays Ms. Soh has a column for Playboy and picks up work as a freelance writer. But that hardly pays the bills. She’s planning to start a podcast soon and, like many members of the I.D.W., has a Patreon account where “patrons” can support her work.
These donations can add up. Mr. Rubin said his show makes at least $30,000 a month on Patreon. And Mr. Peterson says he pulls in some $80,000 in fan donations each month.
Mr. Peterson has endured no small amount of online hatred and some real-life physical threats: In March, during a lecture at Queen’s University in Ontario, a woman showed up with a garrote. But like many in the I.D.W., he also seems to relish the outrage he inspires.
“I’ve figured out how to monetize social justice warriors,” Mr. Peterson said in January on Joe Rogan’s podcast. On his Twitter feed, he called the writer Pankaj Mishra, who’d written an essay in The New York Review of Books attacking him, a “sanctimonious prick” and said he’d happily slap him.
And the upside to his notoriety is obvious: Mr. Peterson is now arguably the most famous public intellectual in Canada, and his book “12 Rules for Life” is a best-seller.
The exile of Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying from Evergreen State brought them to the attention of a national audience that might have come for the controversy but has stayed for their fascinating insights about subjects including evolution and gender. “Our friends still at Evergreen tell us that the protesters think they destroyed us,” Ms. Heying said. “But the truth is we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom.”
“I’ve been at this for 25 years now, having done all the MSM shows, including Oprah, Charlie Rose, ‘The Colbert Report,’ Larry King — you name it,” Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, told me. “The last couple of years I’ve shifted to doing shows hosted by Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Sam Harris and others. The I.D.W. is as powerful a media as any I’ve encountered.”
Mr. Shermer, a middle-aged science writer, now gets recognized on the street. On a recent bike ride in Santa Barbara, Calif., he passed a work crew and “the flag man stopped me and says: ‘Hey, you’re that skeptic guy, Shermer! I saw you on Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan!’” When he can’t watch the shows on YouTube, he listens to them as podcasts on the job. On breaks, he told Mr. Shermer, he takes notes.
“I’ve had to update Quillette’s servers three times now because it’s caved under the weight of the traffic,” Ms. Lehmann said about the publication most associated with this movement.
This weekend, at a lesbian march in Chicago, three women carrying Jewish pride flags — rainbow flags embossed with a Star of David — were kicked out of the celebration on the grounds that their flags were a “trigger.” An organizer of the Dyke March told the Windy City Times that the fabric “made people feel unsafe” and that she and the other members of the Dyke March collective didn’t want anything “that can inadvertently or advertently express Zionism” at the event.
Laurel Grauer, one of the women who was ejected, said she’d been carrying that Jewish pride flag in the march, held on the Saturday before the city’s official Pride Parade, for more than a decade. It “celebrates my queer, Jewish identity,” she explained. This year, however, she lost track of the number of people who harassed her for carrying it.
I’m sorry for the women, like Ms. Grauer, who found themselves under genuine threat for carrying a colorful cloth falsely accused of being pernicious.
But I am also grateful.
Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of “intersectionality” than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March?
Intersectionality is the big idea of today’s progressive left. In theory, it’s the benign notion that every form of social oppression is linked to every other social oppression. This observation — coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw — sounds like just another way of rephrasing a slogan from a poster I had in college: My liberation is bound up with yours. That is, the fight for women’s rights is tied up with the fight for gay rights and civil rights and so forth. Who would dissent from the seductive notion of a global sisterhood?
Well, in practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.
By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.
Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.
One of the women who was asked to leave the Dyke March, Eleanor Shoshany Anderson, couldn’t understand why she was kicked out of an event that billed itself as intersectional. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional,” she said. “I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I felt that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”
She isn’t. Because though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.
That’s why the march organizers and their sympathizers are now trying to smear Ms. Grauer as some sort of right-wing provocateur. Their evidence: She works at an organization called A Wider Bridge, which connects the L.G.B.T.Q. Jewish community in America with the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Israel. The organizers are also making the spurious claim that the Jewish star is necessarily a symbol of Zionist oppression — a breathtaking claim to anyone who has ever seen a picture of a Jew forced to wear a yellow one under the Nazis.
No, the truth is that it was no more and no less than anti-Semitism. Just read Ms. Shoshany Anderson’s account of her experience, which she posted on Facebook after being kicked out of the march.
“I wanted to be in public as a gay Jew of Persian and German heritage. Nothing more, nothing less. So I made a shirt that said ‘Proud Jewish Dyke’ and hoisted a big Jewish Pride flag — a rainbow flag with a Star of David in the center, the centuries-old symbol of the Jewish people,” she wrote. “During the picnic in the park, organizers in their official t-shirts began whispering and pointing at me and soon, a delegation came over, announcing they’d been sent by the organizers. They told me my choices were to roll up my Jewish Pride flag or leave. The Star of David makes it look too much like the Israeli flag, they said, and it triggers people and makes them feel unsafe. This was their complaint.”
She tried to explain that the star is the “ubiquitous symbol of Judaism,” and that she simply wanted “to be Jewish in public.” Then, she “tried using their language,” explaining “this is my intersection. I’m supposed to be able to celebrate it here.”
It didn’t work. Ms. Shoshany Anderson left sobbing. “I was thrown out of Dyke March for being Jewish,” she said. Just so.
For progressive American Jews, intersectionality forces a choice: Which side of your identity do you keep, and which side do you discard and revile? Do you side with the oppressed or with the oppressor?
That kind of choice would have been familiar to previous generations of left-wing Jews, particularly those in Europe, who felt the tug between their ethnic heritage and their “internationalist” ideological sympathies. But this is the United States. Here, progressives are supposed to be comfortable with the idea of hyphenated identities and overlapping ethnic, sexual and political affinities. Since when did a politics that celebrates choice — and choices — devolve into a requirement of being forced to choose?
Jews on the left, particularly in recent years, have attempted to square this growing discomfort by becoming more anti-Israel. But if history has taught the Jews anything it’s that this kind of contortion never ends well.
It may be wrong to read too much into an ugly incident at a single march, but Jews should take what happened in Chicago as a lesson that they might not be as welcome among progressives as they might imagine. That’s a warning for which to be grateful, even as it is a reminder that anti-Semitism remains as much a problem on the far-left as it is on the alt-right.
Two years ago, a 27-year-old man named Kobili Traoré walked into the Paris apartment of a 65-year-old kindergarten teacher named Sarah Halimi. Mr. Traoré beat Ms. Halimi and stabbed her. According to witnesses, he called her a demon and a dirty Jew. He shouted, “Allahu akbar,” then threw Ms. Halimi’s battered body out of her third-story apartment window.
This is what Mr. Traoré told prosecutors: “I felt persecuted. When I saw the Torah and a chandelier in her home I felt oppressed. I saw her face transforming.”
One would think that this would be an open-and-shut hate crime. It was the coldblooded murder of a woman in her own home for the sin of being a Jew. But French prosecutors decided to drop murder charges against Mr. Traoré because he … had smoked cannabis.
If France’s betrayal of Sarah Halimi is shocking to you, perhaps you haven’t been paying much attention to what by now can be described as a moral calamity sweeping the West of which her story is only the clearest example. A crisis, I hasten to add, that’s perhaps less known because it has been largely overlooked by the mainstream press.
The most generous read of this enormous blind spot is that the story is not always straightforward; there have been some laudable steps to fight back. On Tuesday, for example, the French Parliament formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism when it passed a motion declaring anti-Zionism a form of Jew-hatred. Yet on the same day, more than 100 Jewish gravestones were found spray-painted with swastikas in a cemetery near Strasbourg — a potent reminder that governments are only as good as the culture and the people upholding them.
So allow me to put it plainly: We are suffering from a widespread social health epidemic and it is rooted in the cheapening of Jewish blood. If hatred of Jews can be justified as a misunderstanding or ignored as a mistake or played down as a slip of the tongue or waved away as “just anti-Zionism,” you can all but guarantee it will be.
Yet beneath the finger-pointing and the victim-blaming and the accusations of panic lobbed against a people that know a little something about persecution, there is the same old bigotry — the hatred of Jews that has presaged the death of so many seemingly civilized societies. A hatred that still, after centuries, exerts its powerful allure during periods of political and economic unrest, when the angry, the confused, the shortchanged and the scared look for simple explanations and a scapegoat. And even those who seek to uplift the marginalized can’t seem to find their voice when it comes to Jews facing anti-Semitism.
Take a look at some of the events around the Thanksgiving holiday, incidents that have kept Jews all over the world glued to their phones, and which have driven some to update their and their children’s passports.
Start with Britain. Last Friday night, a rabbi who had just left a synagogue was beaten on the street by teenagers screaming, “Kill the Jews.” These now-regular occurrences come as there’s a decent chance that the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will become the next prime minister — giving anti-Semites the imprimatur of a major Western government.
Mr. Corbyn’s long history of slurs against Jews and Israel, his warm words about his “friends” in Hezbollah, and his worldview, which finds far more to admire in countries like Russia and Venezuela than England itself, are well documented. To choose just the latest headline: The BBC, he said on Iranian state television, is “biased” toward saying that “Israel has a right to exist.” (My favorite remains his remark that British Zionists “who, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, don’t understand English irony.”)
The fish rots from the head, and so it has with Labour. According to Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, there are 130 cases of outstanding complaints of anti-Semitism against Labour Party members. Ninety-three percent of British Jews say they won’t vote for Labour. Forty-seven percent say they will “seriously consider” emigrating if Labour wins. And yet the latest polling shows Labour rallying.
Other issues, Jews are told, are more important than their own safety. Sometimes their fears are dismissed as “hysteria.” The socialist filmmaker Ken Loach has called it a “witch hunt.” The powerful union leader Len McCluskey has accused the Jewish community of “intransigent hostility.” When Rabbi Mirvis took the extraordinary step of weighing in on the election, insisting that the very “soul of our nation is at stake,” he was accused, variously, of bad faith, of taking focus away from the real threat of right-wing bigotry, and of actually stoking anti-Semitism himself.
Jewish Voice for Labour, the party’s pet Jewish front group, has codified all of these gaslighting tactics in a document that helpfully lays out the strategy for how other political groups and movements with a will to power can shut down Jewish concerns about organized, systemic anti-Semitism.
Over in Italy, the town of Schio decided against establishing a Holocaust memorial — the subtle, brass “stumbling stones” called stolpersteine that dot the streets of European cities where survivors of Hitler’s genocide still stroll — on the grounds that 14 stones in a city of 40,000 would prove too divisive. “Let the victims rest in peace” said Alberto Bertoldo, a local politician. The memorial, he said, would risk “generating new hatred and division.”
While in Schio the Holocaust proves a divisive moral issue, in Montreal it was a planned trip to Israel. Jordyn Wright is a Jewish sophomore who sits on the board of the Students’ Society of McGill University. Over winter break, she is planning, like hundreds of other North American Jewish college students, to go to Israel with Hillel. As a result of that trip, the student government voted to call for her resignation. Never mind that the trip included time with Palestinians in the West Bank. Never mind that another student government leader is also going; apparently because that student is not a Jew, no resignation was required.
I toggled over the weekend between Ms. Wright’s chilling account of the history of anti-Jewish discrimination at her school and The Washington Post, which had published a frothy profile of Valerie Plame, the former C.I.A. officer who is now running for Congress as a Democrat in New Mexico.
There we learn that Ms. Plame looks “astoundingly good, at 56, as if the high-altitude desert air has preserved her skin since the day she arrived here 12 years ago.” Yet nowhere in the long article does the reader learn that two years ago, Ms. Plame tweeted an essay called “American Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” by a man famous for his anti-Jewish conspiracy thinking on a website that flirts with Holocaust denial. She also shared an article that linked Israel to the Sept. 11 attacks. It somehow didn’t merit mention.
Elsewhere in the Democratic Party, Linda Sarsour, the activist who was removed from her leadership position in the Women’s March thanks to her history of anti-Semitic scandals and who now serves as a surrogate for the presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, gave a talk on Friday to a group called American Muslims for Palestine. The part of her talk that circulated online focused on the apparent hypocrisy of progressive Zionists: How, Ms. Sarsour asked about people who are the No. 1 target of white supremacists, can they claim to oppose white supremacy when they support “a state like Israel that is built on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else?”
Lest you think this is “just anti-Zionism,” consider that the Sanders surrogate was speaking at a conference that printed the following sentence in its program: “Zionism has come in like a disease to destroy the purity of Al Quds.” (Al Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.)
Should I tell you about a Christian fundamentalist show on TruNews hosted by a man named Rick Wiles? TruNews was granted an interview by Donald Trump Jr. and its representative was called on by President Trump at a news conference. Last week on his show Mr. Wiles claimed that Jews are behind the impeachment proceedings against the president. A “Jew coup,” he called it, that would replace Mr. Trump with “a Jewish cabal.”
Should I tell you about the swastikas found at Sixth & I, a synagogue and a hub of Jewish cultural and intellectual life in Washington? Or the ones painted in red on a statue of the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem in Ukraine?
Or that on Monday morning in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a Jewish subway rider reported that another woman yelled slurs and threatened to throw her onto the tracks? And that the following day, also in Crown Heights, three teenagers hurled rocks at a Jewish elementary school bus, breaking a window.
There is a theme here. The theme is that Jew-hatred is surging and yet Jewish victimhood does not command attention or inspire popular outrage. That unless Jews are murdered by neo-Nazis, the one group everyone of conscience recognizes as evil, Jews’ inconvenient murders, their beatings, their discrimination, the singling out of their state for demonization will be explained away.
When you look at each of these incidents, perhaps it is possible still to pretend that these are random bursts of bigotry perpetrated by hooligans lacking any real organization or power behind them.
But Mr. Corbyn’s electoral prospects in Britain tell a different, far more distressing story — that a person with some of the same impulses as those hooligans can stand within spitting distance of the office of prime minister. This is what happens when a culture decides that Jewish lives are stumbling stones.
She excels at writing and tackles dangerous subjects. This time, the danger came from her peers. She'll find a good job.
I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming. [...] But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
It's the letter the keeps on getting better.
You can check out a lot of interviews of her, including one of my favorites, found here
On July 15 2020 01:08 Nevuk wrote: Bari Weiss has resigned from the NYT, alleging a campaign of bullying. I personally found her extremely annoying, but I don't think she was nearly the worst problem at the NYT (that would be bedbug of great renown, Bret Stephens, along with Judith Miller ever having been employed).
I found her annoying due to a combination of her victim complex, proclamations to not be right wing, and some pseudo-intellectual garbage terminology ("Intellectual dark web"). She's not a centrist, as she continually proclaimed herself to be. Her characterizations of the facts could also be really loose at times. However, if her work had been subject to heavier fact checking I'm not sure I'd really have found her work to be objectionable (her twitter was generally bad, but the same can be said for most high profile twitter users at the times).
The issue wasn't Bari Weiss, it was a paper publishing glowing profiles of open nazis, op-eds that they hadn't read, and editors that don't seem to want to do their job. While I think she brought some of this on herself, she was encouraged to do so by editors at the paper who weren't willing to defend her, which is a special kind of cowardice.
From her resignation letter -
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.
She didn't coin the "pseudo-intellectual garbage terminology," she just used what somebody else had already called it. It had been used on Joe Rogan podcast and others before her. So I don't really think she had abundant editorial latitude to relabel a group of ... I guess primarily lefties questioning current dialogue and academia ... after over a million people had already had that particular description used.
The NYT is on a bad slide. It's such a shame. But hey, free market and all, they have the right to go in that direction and please a readership with certain ideas about conversations that shouldn't be had.
Fair enough. Like I said, I found IDW and some of her other terms irritating, but really not her fault (I've always avoided Joe Rogan). I feel like driving Bari Weiss out but still keeping Bret Stephens has to be some crazy workplace sexism. One of these people is flawed but at least interesting. The other is well, burned toast trying to eat me in my sleep while it fails journalism 101.
I still find it somewhat disconcerting, (though certainly in the spirit of the times) that the big NYT controversy was about whether or not the paper should publish an oped by the senator from Arkansas proclaiming himself a fascist and NOT the fact that the senator from Arkansas is a fascist.
On July 15 2020 03:20 KlaCkoN wrote: I still find it somewhat disconcerting, (though certainly in the spirit of the times) that the big NYT controversy was about whether or not the paper should publish an oped by the senator from Arkansas proclaiming himself a fascist and NOT the fact that the senator from Arkansas is a fascist.
It would be a better decision than putting that giant editors note on the article and firing the editor. Go call Cotton a fascist, every Previous president that used the military domestically fascist, 58% of Americans fascist. That article/response would be fire.
The Trump administration has gone back on the rule that would not allow international students to stay in the county if their classes were all online. Glad they did this as it made no sense on any level. When your economy is hurting you kind of want people there spending money. It is good that they switched but it is hard to congratulate them on solving the problem they created.
Much as I'd like to decrease the international student population in the US, this "pulling the rug" approach was nothing short of mean-spirited. Not to mention it encourages schools to open, consequences be damned. Wonder what made him have a change of heart.
On July 15 2020 09:45 LegalLord wrote: Much as I'd like to decrease the international student population in the US, this "pulling the rug" approach was nothing short of mean-spirited. Not to mention it encourages schools to open, consequences be damned. Wonder what made him have a change of heart.
Maybe someone explained to him that it would yet another lost series of court cases.
On July 15 2020 09:45 LegalLord wrote: Much as I'd like to decrease the international student population in the US, this "pulling the rug" approach was nothing short of mean-spirited. Not to mention it encourages schools to open, consequences be damned. Wonder what made him have a change of heart.
What is the problem with the international students? I learned a lot from the ones I went with and im sure the government is not footing the bill. It really seems like a win for the institutions, other students and communities.
On July 15 2020 09:45 LegalLord wrote: Much as I'd like to decrease the international student population in the US, this "pulling the rug" approach was nothing short of mean-spirited. Not to mention it encourages schools to open, consequences be damned. Wonder what made him have a change of heart.
What is the problem with the international students? I learned a lot from the ones I went with and im sure the government is not footing the bill. It really seems like a win for the institutions, other students and communities.
To explain in a way that also shares I don't support it,
The idea is that these students just come to American to get a degree and then they leave the country, taking a spot from an American student that would better the country and instead strengthen our economic enemies.
the day has come everyone. That Mitch McConnell is the reasonable person in the room to listen to and to follow.
On July 15 2020 09:45 LegalLord wrote: Much as I'd like to decrease the international student population in the US, this "pulling the rug" approach was nothing short of mean-spirited. Not to mention it encourages schools to open, consequences be damned. Wonder what made him have a change of heart.
What is the problem with the international students? I learned a lot from the ones I went with and im sure the government is not footing the bill. It really seems like a win for the institutions, other students and communities.
To explain in a way that also shares I don't support it,
The idea is that these students just come to American to get a degree and then they leave the country, taking a spot from an American student that would better the country and instead strengthen our economic enemies.
How often does that happen? I would have thought international students would want to stick around.
Our international students pay like 3-4x our tuition fees so they’re rather useful to academic institutions over here. Not sure how that works in the States though