Comment by mrtksn
1 year ago
Honestly, I'm baffled by the American keywordism and obsession with images. They seem to think that if they don't say certain words and show people from minorities in the marketing material the racism and discrimination will be solved and atrocities from the past will be forgiven.
It only become unmanageable and builds up resentment. Anyway, maybe its a phase. Sometimes I wonder if the openly racist European&Asians ways are healthier since it starts with unpleasant honesty and then comes the adjustment as people of different ethnic and cultural background come to understand each other and learn how to live together.
I was minority in the country I was born and I'm immigrant/expat everywhere and I'm very familiar with racism and discrimination. The worst is the hidden one, I'm completely fine with racist people say their things, its very useful for avoiding them. The institutional racism is easy to overcome by winning the hearts of the non-racists, for every racist there are 9 fair and welcoming people out there who are interested in other cultures and want to see people treated fairly and you end up befriending them and learn from them and adapt to their ways when preserving things important to you. This keyword banning and fake smiles makes everything harder and people are freaking out when you try to discuss cultural stuff like something you do in your household that is different from what is the norm in this locality because they are afraid to say something wrong. This stuff seriously degrades the society. It's almost as if Americans want to skip the part of understanding and adaptation of people from different backgrounds by banning words and smiling all the time.
> discrimination will be solved and atrocities from the past will be forgiven
The majority of people that committed these atrocities are dead. Will you stoop to their same level and collectively discriminate against whole swaths of populations based on the actions of some dead people? Guilt by association? An eye for an eye? Great way to perpetuate the madness. How about you focus on individuals, as only they can act and be held accountable? Find the extortion inherent to the system, and remove it so individuals can succeed.
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Do you have sources for these events? I’d like to read them. Thanks!
I thought that a Yale speaker giving a public talk disparaging white people where they say they fantasize about shooting white people in the head was pretty extreme[1]. Even more so since it didn’t seem to bother the attendees there, and there was no push back until someone leaked the audio a few months later. If the audio hadn’t leaked, it seems like Yale and the attendees would have just considered that a normal lecture.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/yale-says-lecture-fanta...
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People often use “do you have sources, I'd like to read them” to imply “links, or that didn't happen”.
However, sources* for all of the above are easily found, both coverage as the story is breaking and followups. For example:
news campus students chant kill jews classroom locked door
https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-colleges-jewish-students-seen...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/chants-calling-murder-jews-sho...
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-stresses-cooper-un...
Or ...
news fbi memo catholic extremists
https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-internal-memo-warns-against-22142...
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/new-report-...
https://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?sto...
The ease with which links surface suggests if one genuinely wanted to read sources, one could Google with no effort.
* NOTE: Media made broad claims on all of these, and media made narrow “corrections”. It's easy enough to find both types of sources. Asking someone for sources doesn't prove anything. On controversial topics one really needs to “do your own research.”
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For the race-essentialist practices described by the original poster, Yascha Mounk's "The Identity Trap," published in 2023, and interviews with Coleman Hughes regarding his college experience at Columbia are insightful resources.
To delve into the philosophical roots that lead to the type of absurd reasoning mentioned by the original poster, "Cynical Theories" by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, released in 2020, is recommended. Despite Lindsay's more recent radical stance, the book provides a critical exploration of these theories. It is also heavy on citations.
For the kind of misconduct in higher education described by the original poster, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) serve as reliable references. There's no lack of explicit anti-semitism on campus.
The discussion around "woke" culture is often muddled by attempts to obscure its existence, framing it as merely an extreme right-wing concern. For those who genuinely want a quick way to challenge their priors regarding "woke" being some kind of "right-wing" thing, you should give this short piece[0] a read. Does it comport with your notion of "right-wing"? If not, you should start questioning those who use "right-wing" as a boogeymen to convince you that there isn't a radical ideology who've created newspeak for their brand of racism, sexism, whatever-ism.
[0] https://helenpluckrose.substack.com/p/defining-woke-and-woke...
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Western countries should have paid more attetion on social media as a means of information warfare. It has been so easy for actors from Russia and China to polarize the political landscape. Both Trump supporters and the woke left are just useful idiots implementing their plans. In EU we similarly have both anti-EU "nationalists" and lefties who oppose nuclear and call for open borders, both groups most definitely working for Russia whether they know it or not.
Maybe they just don't do it at the scale Russia does it but:
https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
We’re only allowed to acknowledge foreign influence on the right, even suggesting the left is also susceptible is highly verboten.
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All of those things happened in real life, though.
It's the most online people who don't believe these things actually happened. Go to some of the towns where these issues actually occurred and see what people think.
While there's definitely something to be said for ignoring the ridiculous extremes that a world of billions of people can throw up, there's still some much less dramatic effects in our daily lives.
For example, at the big company I worked for in the UK if you were to look at our marketing material, documentation and in-app images you'd be forgiven for thinking that the UK was 30% black and 20% South Asian. (East Asians were comparatively neglected, being about as common as white men)
Harvard and UNC lost a lawsuit over being racist to Asians.
Was that online, too?
I agree with both GP and you.
LOL. Please don't be so eager to prove OP's point. It is kind of tacky.
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