Wednesday, July 08, 2020

the contrarian black and white voices matter

Update (July 15):
More shocks:
Bari Weiss resignation letter from the New York Times.

James Flynn's (known for the 'Flynn effect') book on free speech has been pulled by the publisher.
/update

My poor imitation of a Dylan line goes like this: How many contrarians need to speak out before their voices are heard?

In the wake of a just cause (anti racism) we witness the cancer of anti racism religion, the woke cancel culture.

Now they are trying to cancel Steven Pinker. I'm shocked by the depths of their stupidity. As Jim said, "How childish ... Wittgenstein doesn’t have enough middle fingers for them."

The cancel attempt is here.

There is a great rebuttal here.

I say that the contrarian black voices matter because when I did not understand what was happening in America I searched and found coherent analysis from them.

I'm referring to Glen Loury (twitter), John McWhorter (twitter), Coleman Hughes (twitter) as well as Killer Mike (video) and rapper Lupe Fiasco (video). Read and listen to these guys if you really want to understand what is happening in America with regard to race.

So, which slogan should I support. "Black Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter". I think Steven Pinker has explained this better than anyone:
Linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a trope or collocation, such as the slogan “All lives matter,” and the proposition that all lives matter. (Is someone prepared to argue that some lives don’t matter?) And linguists, of all people, should understand the difference between a turn in the context of a conversational exchange and a sentence that expresses an idea. It’s true that if someone were to retort “All lives matter” in direct response to “Black lives matter,’ they’d be making a statement that downplays the racism and other harms suffered by African Americans. But that is different from asking questions about whom police kill, being open to evidence on the answer, and seeking to reduce the number of innocent people killed by the police of all races. The fact is that Mullainathan and four other research reports have found the same thing: while there’s strong evidence that African Americans are disproportionately harassed, frisked, and manhandled by the police (so racism among the police is a genuine problem), there’s no evidence that they are killed more, holding rates of dangerous encounters constant. (References below.) As Mullainathan notes, this doesn’t downplay racism, but it pinpoints its effects: in drug laws, poverty, housing segregation, and other contributors to being in dangerous situations, but not on in the behavior of police in lethal encounters. And it has implications for how to reduce police killings, which is what we should all care about: it explains the finding that race-specific like training police in implicit bias and hiring more minority police have no effect, while across-the-board measures such as de-escalation training, demilitarization, changing police culture, and increasing accountability do have an effect.
(follow the link to The Purity Posse pursues Pinker to see the 6 references listed)
So, yes, the contrarian white voices matter too.

Related:
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate A statement signed by 150 people incl. Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Garry Kasparov, Steven Pinker, Gloria Steinem, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes and Salman Rushdie expresses concern over the illiberal trend intensified by our national reckoning

My Enlightenment fanaticism by Scott Aaronson

covid-19 Inspiring Black Rights Matter Protest Long discussion thread in which I became involved, attempting to assess the true nature of the Black Lives Matter protests.

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