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The Shor Thing
I still can’t wrap my head around the “canceling” of David Shor. Shor is the progressive data analyst who tweeted a link to a research paper written by Omar Wasow of Princeton that showed that peaceful protest moves public opinion toward protesters, while rioting moves opinion in the opposite direction.
Progressphiles kicked Shor off its LISTSERV and released a statement that said, in part:
In response to a well-deserved call in over a racist tweet, he encouraged harassment that led to death threats instead of choosing to learn and grow from his mistake. We as the Progressphiles Moderators, professionals in this industry, and as people, absolutely condemn this behavior. It is unacceptable to make people on this list and in this community feel unsafe for calling out wrongdoings. We cannot begin to decolonize our minds if we do not create safety for those fighting against white supremacy.
Comments by Progressphile members following Shor’s expulsion were also interesting:
Sometimes [racism is] quiet; steeped in seemingly innocuous data and facts. Racism can wrap itself in the trappings of credible logic and I swear it can make sense.
[T]he idea that the moderators are someone shutting down discourse is patently absurd. Worth considering that they are indeed, trying to shut down discourse that might actually be offensive or racist for good reason.
According to Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing in NRO,
Ari Trujillo Wesler (co-founder of OpenField, a Democratic canvassing app) said that sharing the Wasow paper “reeks of anti-blackness,” then tagged in David Shor’s boss, saying, ‘Come get your boy.’… Shor’s fellow employees complained that his tweet made them “unsafe.”
Why was Shor’s tweet racist?
Why are Omar Wasow’s findings racist?
Is the proper woke position that black Americans are naturally violent people who like to riot? If so, why isn’t this position racist?
Or is the proper woke position that black Americans must riot to accomplish… what?
And if rioting is intended to accomplish something, why is it racist to suggest that another tactic might be more effective?
Is simply disagreeing with some blacks racist even though other blacks also believe that rioting is ineffective?
Why does suggesting that rioting is counterproductive make people feel unsafe? Do riots give Progressives a sense of security?
“Decolonize our minds?”
How does suggesting that riots are ineffective support white supremacy?
Are facts, if they really are true, racist? If they are false, can’t people simply provide counter facts and logic without attacking the mistaken person as evil?
How can one person simultaneously hold the following diametrically opposed thoughts in his head?
- The moderators didn’t shut down the discussion and claims that they did are absurd
- The moderators shut down the discussion for good reason
Do people really think and talk this way?
Published in General
It could also be that the powers-that-be on the Left realize that they can’t prevent the riots, looting, and arson because most of it is being done by opportunists who don’t care anything about the cause. Shor’s tweet was telling them what they already knew but couldn’t do anything about. If they’re stuck with the violence, they might as well try to legitimize it as part of the struggle. They want to shape the narrative before Trump and his supporters can use the riots either to discredit BLM or to pick up votes in November.
Every person they cancel is a recruit for our cause.
Like so many leftist movements, they cannot control themselves. Had the Girondins not been purged and Guillotined, Napoleon would never have risen to power and the French Revolution might well have succeeded. Jean Paul Marat was the equivalent of Social Media. His murder by Charlotte Corday set off the Terror, which was ended by the Guillotine of Robespierre. The Red Guards of China were finally stopped by Mao. The USA is not China or revolutionary France in 1793. There is intense pressure building for an end to this nonsense. The arrest of the few Whites who have resisted using guns is evidence of the agenda of those behind this unrest. George Soros, who funded the campaigns of the DAs charging the St Louis and Martinez CA couples, has become rather visible. I would hope those couples find legal representation. The St Louis couple seem well able to take care of themselves, being wealthy lawyers. I hope both can pierce the sovereign immunity protecting both DAs and Soros.
You know. I wear a mask. Not because I want to or even out of respect for others’ feelings or fears, but because I fear the government. I now fear the jury. When so many sane things are rejected, and so much mindless baseless self-contradictory stuff is being presented as ‘truth’, I don’t even think that the legal system is immune. Come to think of it, look at this opening paragraph from a Breitbart article today:
How can anyone feel safe when this is acceptable as the rule of law? And when “hate crime” is such a vague and all-encompassing term. And jurors are anti-factual, brainwashed and vengeful (see Roger Stone).
At the upper levels there’s definitely some of that going on, to where they can’t control the excesses of the mob, so they attempt to spin the situation as best as possible. But at the lower levels, including with some of those reporting on the violence, it is hard to tell, when they say it’s a “mostly peaceful protest” while standing in front of a burning building or a mob trying to topple statues of even abolitionists, whether they’re doing it because they and their bosses are trying to convince the sheep in the audience that’s true, or if they believe events with burning, looting and vandalism are “mostly peaceful” because they actually don’t see burning, looting and vandalism as a problem if the cause is just.
Race creates racism. It’s obvious now.
Revolutions eventually eat their own
– V D Hanson
Potentially. You have to remember that we’re icky.
But if they do approach, and it turns out that people don’t reject them out of hand for their political idiosyncrasies — I mean, we put up with @arahant — then maybe …
And race is a social construct. End Race Consciousness Now.
The health experts aren’t hypocrites or believe two contradictory things. They are weighing relative risk. Their professional training has led them to conclude that systemic racism is a grave danger to the public health. It results in the killing of large numbers of unarmed black males by the police; in Persons of Color it causes all the comorbidities that make COVID-19 and other illnesses so deadly. So eliminating systemic racism is more important to public health than the slight risk of contracting COVID-19 while doing so. People in those demonstrations are just as much essential front line workers as people who staff hospitals.
On the other hand, churches, synagogues, national parks, beaches, and the like are mostly institutions which perpetuate systemic racism, and so the risk of attending and participating is unjustified.
The news about Martinez, CA is sad. My mom was raised there and I still have family living there. I’ve seen some beautiful murals there. My cousin works at the library there.
There is also a generational element here and a negation of the old “no enemies on the left” rule. The old leftists are being purged by the younger leftists who want power now.
Andrew Klavan had a good point, one that I had been dancing around but not coming to head on. It has to do with truth, rationality, reason, consistency, lies and the normal desire of liars to have a lie believed.
And that’s that the Left, the progressives, the Democrats, or whatever you want to call them, and the Press, and the Judiciary, have now thrown reason and truth and reality away. Their arguments are not intended to be rational or consistent or in line with reality, or even true, but are all convenient lies, lies which aren’t even intended to resemble the truth; I would add, much like advertising slogans which are meant to have a certain effect on the crowd today, and be replaced with a different one tomorrow.
The science is settled.
0bamacare is a tax.
Silence is violence.
Masks save grandma.
Trump is responsible for 100,000 dead.
All whites are racist.
The Revolution was ought to preserve slavery.
And if someone says your words hurt someone by bouncing a brown-skinned child on your lap, or by saying all lives matter, you must immediately apologize even if you think you weren’t wrong, or even if you didn’t even hurt anyone.
Hands up, don’t shoot!
Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, was murdered
Going alt-right won’t make anything better. It will, in fact, make things far worse. But you can see the logic of someone that is riding the fence: “If I interact with black people then I’m going to be called a racist no matter what I do. The safest way for me to live is to simply avoid all interaction with minorities.” And that’s the real shame of the twisted logic of racial identify politics. It takes people from disparate races and makes them suspicious of one another. It’s truly shameful.
They become enraged at the common sense idea that violence, vandalism, and looting turns ordinary people off? It’s racist to even say so? Well, of course. Progressives have become unsustainably silly.
I see no reason to warn them off of this tendency. As they say, if an opponent is destroying himself don’t interfere.
Some of the best minds among them have already had enough.
If white supremacists had founded Black Lives Matter to foment racial division, strife, segregation, etc., they could hardly be doing a better job of it.
All this racist stuff is confusing me. I didn’t know I was supposed to be racist, as a child nobody ever told me. To be told I am a white raciest or have white privilege at age 80+is a bit of a shock. I don’t think I will give up my 5 great grandchildren of color nor my friends of color. I love them to much.
Oh, sure. Using the old, “Some of my favorite family members are black,” dodge.
You think you’re shocked? Try being an old white male and discovering that with patriarchy, privilege and systemic racism you were running the whole world all this time and did not even know it.
There is no honor among thieves. By default, Leftists are takers of other people’s goods, money, and property. They are thieves with no honor. The only thing for a smart Leftist to do is shoot all your fellow Leftists before one of them shoots you.
Richard,
Over and over I have been trying to get across the reality of a nihilistic philosophical school that took root in American universities in the late 1990s. “The facts don’t matter, only the narrative matters.” This is the deconstructionist creed. Once you have adopted this schizophrenic philosophy there is no longer any need to refute a highly rational argument based on well-documented facts. You simply declare that it supports the “racist” narrative, reject it on that basis alone, and try to destroy its author.
When you get over its modern-sounding adjectives, deconstructionism is a magical anti-enlightenment epistemology that should remind us of the 1984 novel. In the dystopian novel, the government asserts that ‘wrong think’ can be ‘detected’ by the government no matter the facts. The government then goes beyond that and asserts that whatever it says is true is true. Even to the point of 2 + 2 is equal to 5. If the government says it’s 5 then it is 5.
We need to realize that this is already happening not just take it as a warning from a dystopian novel suggesting that it might happen.
Regards,
Jim
Scenes from The Dark Knight and Ghost Ship are running through my head right now.
Why I moved to Arizona after 60 years in California. My wife is third generation CA native.
Great description of the mindset. It’s really just ad hominem attacks wrapped in esoteric language that’s intended to (a) obscure the fact that it’s nothing more than name calling, (b) make it sound very deep and learned, and (c) intimidate people who might otherwise object.
I’ve felt this way at times. I don’t think I’m alone.
Richard,
Now you’ve got it exactly. They snuck in the backdoor to get tenure. After that, they need those psychotic screaming attack dog “protestors” to deliver a lethal blow to their targets. We must continue to punch our way into free speech on campus, not only for our conservative kids, but for embattled conservative profs who would love to hit these clowns hard but are pinned down by their dirty tactics.
Regards,
Jim
Derbyshire got into a lot of trouble for that advice, which I think is good in general.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire/