Yep.
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The problem with this argument is that the right are just making up things, wholecloth, and claiming them as the rhetoric and positions of the left. It literally doesn’t matter what the left are actually saying, because Republicans aren’t objecting to anything even remotely grounded in reality. CRT being the perfect example - some conservatives decided the name sounded scary, so started making things up that they could falsely claim were part of it. So voters got upset about “CRT” in grade schools (where it never has been) because it taught certain things (which it absolutely doesn’t); all the left can do is point out that it’s all a complete lie. The problem being, there are two media cultures in the US - the mainstream, corporate-conservative media, and the far-right media that’s just propaganda now, and the latter is what conservatives are watching, existing in a right-wing media bubble which the truth will rarely penetrate.
CRT is just the most obvious example - there are plenty more of conservatives objecting to things that aren’t real. I see a lot of conservative stories about people who are “cancelled” that ignore what actually happened. E.g. stories of students being persecuted by “left-wing cancel culture” when in reality they were stories about students suspended from school for bullying classmates… the facts simply left out of the story. So it matters not at all what the left actually do or say, as it’s not even part of the “controversies.”
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Needs a textbook illustration of Jordaddy.
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Nope. Nope. Nope. That just makes it sound exotic. “Critical Race Theory” might be a scholarly field well documented by academic presses, and the kind of articles that can be rented for 30 bucks a day.
“Critical Race Theory Panic” is a national conspiracy theory that is freely disseminated in the “New American”, on “Fox News” and other media outlets of even iller repute.
The similarities are coincidental.
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Basically what I’m saying: call it a panic, call it BS, call it what it is whenever they use the term “CRT”. Insist they use a reality-based term to describe what they’re really up in arms about.
Despite the counsel of the weak and despairing, we certainly do not have to “fight this war on the territory we are given” by right-wingers.
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It’s not to hard to understand why the NYT says this stuff – it’s because they’re assholes – but it takes some working out why they don’t understand what assholes they’re being.
They keep stepping on this same cognitive rake, because in the whole history of their august institution, the American public has never thought the Grey Lady to be an asshole. It’s simply not possible; their Journalistic Standards are too rigorous to represent anything but the pure distilled consciousness of America. Why else, in 200 years, has no one ever called them a bunch of pig-ignorant reactionary mummies before now, hmm?
I mean, unless people were screaming that all along, and those people just didn’t control the entire news establishment or something.
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alex pareene had their number four years ago–
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We didn’t get Marjorie Taylor Green because we complained that Louis CK kept masturbating in front of women.
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you, along with the new york times have clearly lost the thread of what the first amendment actually says. what they are asking for, and what you are suggesting we assent to, is not freedom of speech but freedom from consequences. in the case of the crt moral panic it is the freedom from the consequences of being a collection of lying sacks of shit. assenting to this is submitting to the death cult’s definition of reality which is a bridge too far.
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Nice. But yes, it’s also sad at best that we’re still all talking about this same fucking thing.
If you think offensive speech shouldn’t be aired in certain contexts and venues, you don’t believe in free speech. Which is why it is incumbent on Weiss, and her bosses, to ask me to come to the offices of the New York Times and give a talk to the editors and columnists of the opinion page about how stupid they are.
It is absolutely necessary, for the sake of democratic ideals, that the staff attend my talk, and they must listen politely (and quietly) as I condescendingly dismiss their idiotic worldviews and personally insult them. They cannot yell at me or express indignation in any way. For them not to allow this to happen would be an alarming sign of the decline of liberalism in the West.
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The same way Frodo lost his uncle’s ring by taking tremendous efforts to see it destroyed forever, except with the good and bad guys swapped.
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The Republican party is now the party of Fox News, Trump’s death cult, Nazis, KKK members and Qanon conspiracy nutjobs. They. Are. GONE. And they ain’t coming back. It’s 2022, not 2008. Things have changed, and this viewpoint is insanely naive at this point.
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So, the New York Times would have me sit back and not shame or shun people who say shit like this?
I don’t see how allowing shit like that doesn’t end up with people like me in death camps.
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And they’ve been cheating for a lot longer than most people acknowledge. Voter suppression and gerrymandering aren’t old and they aren’t new. It’s business as usual for them.
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The volume and vitriol of the response here on BB warms my heart! Can we submit the NYT editorial to AITA on Reddit?
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That Fucking Newspaper has done it again with yet another one, and not a commissioned opinion piece, but by The Editorial Board itself. You can find it yourself if you want. It’s actually even dumber than many of them!
I’ll just re-run Pareene classic.
I couldn’t agree more: If you think offensive speech shouldn’t be aired in certain contexts and venues, you don’t believe in free speech. Which is why it is incumbent on Weiss, and her bosses, to ask me to come to the offices of the New York Times and give a talk to the editors and columnists of the opinion page about how stupid they are.
It is absolutely necessary, for the sake of democratic ideals, that the staff attend my talk, and they must listen politely (and quietly) as I condescendingly dismiss their idiotic worldviews and personally insult them. They cannot yell at me or express indignation in any way. For them not to allow this to happen would be an alarming sign of the decline of liberalism in the West.
It’s not enough that I have the right to criticize Bari Weiss, James Bennet, and Bret Stephens here at the web publication I work for, or on Twitter, or really any other platform I have access to. The problem is that there is a platform I don’t have access to—the offices of the New York Times, specifically the opinion section—and, therefore, I have no way to personally and directly criticize the people I find objectionable. That is a clear-cut violation of the principle of open and lively democratic debate.
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What part of the progressive agenda are they wrong about? That climate change is real and a major problem we need to tackle now? That women and trans people deserve full bodily autonomy? That all workers deserve a living wage and health care? That we should have a humane and easy to navigate immigration system? That racism is a poison which curdles everything? That we should all pay our fair share of taxes? That housing, healthcare, education, etc are human rights? That’s the general progressive agenda, and I’m unsure where it’s “wrong” in the same way the people who want to push through nothing but hate and tax cuts are wrong. Which they emphatically are. There is nothing that can be done with tax cuts and hate except move all wealth upward, strip the public of any commons, and kill people.
And holding people accountable for what they DO and SAY is not “cancel culture”… it’s consequences.
And BTW, those are not just talked about by the left, but by anyone in academia, where ever they stand politically, because it’s part of the scholarship. This is like saying that jargon from other fields is “weird” and an ideology.
Much like postmodernism, there is a definiton, that is easy to find, if you spend more time reading and listening.
Please explain how academics don’t’ live in the real world, too. We ALL do. We all got to pay rent/mortgages… we all have families, get sick, drive cars, pay bills - quite a few academics are now living on the fucking margins of society, highly educated, and unable to make ends meet because of the decades long right wing assault on academia (which the people who are “opposed” to academia are also byproducts of, BTW, so if you think they’re some scrappy outsider, you’re mistaken, in that most of them are from the most elite institutions…).
They are using it to dehumanize people.
Yes. But it has a pretty simple explanation which is a field of legal study seeking to understand why the civil rights legislation of the 1960s did not fix inequality. It’s not that complicated or that evil. I do remember how so many conservatives were equally wringing their hands over postmodernism being so obscure, but that really wasn’t either. If you get in the weeds, but the over view is pretty straight forward - a set of philosophical views that critiqued modernism - and that came form the left and right… They lobbed the exact same set of “critiques” at postmodernism and it was not any more right then than the ones being lobbed at CRT are now…
and we know that, because they’ve said it out loud in public…
And this is the problem with this line of argument being made - that all of this is somehow connected and it’s all our fault for demanding things like basic fucking dignity.
Fuck that, tho.
There are people who have that goal, and the people on their side who may not, but are willing to let that happen as long as they “win”…
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