Race

What a grim and ghastly tale of the Jew as the Jonah. The Israeli team has been booted out of an international youth frisbee competition in Ghent, Belgium due to safety concerns after the Israelis were threatened. My nephew is in this team. Is it fear or fetish or both, this surrender to islamothugs.

Glenn Loury and John McWhorter conduct a tour de force conversation on the affirmative action ruling.

Just a reminder of Walter Russell Mead’s wise words from 2012 regarding anti-Semitism:

The rise of anti-Semitism is a sign of widespread social and cultural failure. It is a leading indicator of a loss of faith in liberal values and of a diminished capacity to understand the modern world and to thrive in it. Societies that tolerate anti-Semitism take a fateful step toward the loss of both freedom and prosperity.

In The Telegraph, columnist Janet Daly hopes for a wake for Woke in The Telegraph:

Maybe it is the secret that explains why British life is not torn asunder by culture wars in the way that the United States so often is. Instead of taking up arms against the advancing guard of combatants who threaten to dismantle your social values, and fighting to the death (often literally) in the streets as Americans are inclined to do, the British take a softly-softly, appeasing tone ⁠— giving a bit here, offering a bit there to the angry mob, without ever losing their sense of irony. Until ⁠— almost without warning ⁠— the onslaught grows so overblown and overconfident that it becomes patently, stupidly, undeniably crazy, self-contradictory and, most important, risible.

Last month Harvard put on a performance of Macbeth “designated to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members”. Horrible, yes; illegal, surely?

This is so full-throated by David Horowitz (posted by John Hinderaker at Powerline). Entitled “The Read Existential Threat”, it rings very true to me, given the unforced error that is the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Anti-white racism, and ignorant attacks on the American founding ⁠— these constitute the greatest existential threat to America. And the fact that Black Lives Matter fictions make up the crippling doctrine of our military leaders should wake everyone to the menace we face. There never has been a greater threat to our patrimony and freedom since the darkest days of the Civil War.

John McWhorter on “Black Fragility”:

DiAngelo, you may have heard, has a new one out. But do you really need to read yet another book about how white people just don’t get it? After all, roll the tape again and the main theme of intelligent black thought might not be so obsessed with this notion that black America must sit mired in charismatic anomie until white people “get it.” Imagine a black America all about not “Why don’t they get it?” but “How do we get ours regardless?”

In Quillette, Kenny Xu and Christian Watson take the time to spell out the bleedin’ obvious: that Critical Race Theory does not extend but rather undermines the Civil Rights movement.

Only a racist believes that there is some fundamental skin-color-defined moral essence within any of us.

At Lockheed-Martin, White Men As Full Diversity Partners ⁠— a workshop for senior executives. Well I guess that’s why they get paid the big bucks. Excruciating.

Victor Davis Hanson, caustic as usual, on Leftist support of Hamas: “The new American Middle East policy is an extension of the new American domestic policy.” Yet so far the Biden Administration has been pretty good at holding off the “international community”’s usual calumnious onslaught against Israel during conflagrations. I hope the current White House doesn’t expect as quid pro quo Israel’s support for its desire to appease Iran.

(The irritatingly insouciant) Lionel Shriver notes that there will likely be unpleasant geopolitical consequences to wokeness in that Western civilization’s illiberal adversaries will interpret the bewailing self-castigation coming from American and British elites as evidence of actual decline ⁠— correctly or not (though I suspect correctly).

Up with the revolution! Death to me!

The URL city-journal.org/white-fragility suggests that this piece by Coleman Hughes is the house stance on the insanity; good.

What a shame that this seemingly literate musing on Stormfront in The Boys dives off the deep-end into America-reviling revisionism:

The Nazis actually praised the American system and copied a lot of its most atrocious ideas. So when the U.S. government welcomed Nazi scientists into our space program, it was an unsurprising extension of that connection.

And regarding Homelander:

He is misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, pro-military, pro-American imperialism, and naturally, anti-abortion. Oh and he’s also a stone-cold sociopath and mass murderer.

A psychopath to be sure, but whence the rest? Homelander seems only cynically a flag-waver/wearer. The author does makes her “progressive” position clear by referring to “pro-military” and “anti-abortion” as evils. I guess I’d been bamboozled earlier by her nice summation of Nietzsche; whoever could do that would not, I presume, be so deeply idiotic.

The author might wish to consider even just for a moment the two greatest wars the United States ever fought ⁠— the Civil War and World War Two. Me waxing portentous: if this is normative discourse for geek outlets such as Nerdist, then we must worry for liberal civilization. [You don’t say, me…]

The New York Times abandons key claims of the 1619 Project, as reported by the World Socialist Web Site ⁠— this stuff it seems is too kooky even for them.

I do consider Jonah Goldberg overrated, but he nails it regarding the US DoE calling out Princeton’s woke bullshit:

Princeton: Take our confessions of systematic institutional racism seriously but not literally.

With “Beyond the Face of Race: Emo-Cognitive Exporations of White Neurosis and Racial Cray-Cray” co-authored by Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility, I’m reminded of the totally nutty 1991 The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors by Frances Cress Welsing (5 stars with 1,109 ratings on Amazon!).

That said, this paper reads altogether more sanely than that earlier book, though its self-described parables are pretty darn vicious; perhaps it’s telling that they’re explicitly not by DiAngelo but rather credited solely to co-author Cheryl E. Matias.

A solitary voice suggesting Vitamin D, Matt Ridley in The Spectator:

The bottom line is that an elderly, overweight, dark-skinned person living in the north of England, in March, and sheltering indoors most of the time is almost certain to be significantly vitamin D deficient. If not taking supplements, he or she should be anyway, regardless of the protective effect against the Covid virus. Given that it might be helpful against the virus, should not this advice now be shouted from the rooftops?

I do believe that the Western media ⁠— and therefore Western society in general ⁠— is actively uninterested in a biological reason for why darker-skinned people are suffering more from the novel coronavirus; such a materialistic and addressable cause does not fit the fashionable angle of systemic racism. So who suffers?

Dave Seminara writes “When Your Favorite Companies Go Woke” in The Wall Street Journal (paywall).

I feel similarly regarding the homepage banners at Node.js (“#BlackLivesMatter”) and Linode (“Black Lives Matter. Linode is committed to social justice and equality.”), both of which I rely on for my work. There are substitutes for Linode, but none for Node.

The Daily Mail has 8:38 minutes of police bodycam footage of the George Floyd arrest.

Given what this American Spectator article contains ⁠— the transcript of the exchange between George Floyd and the arresting policemen before he was even on the ground and the toxicology report stating George Floyd’s death was in all likelihood due to an overdose ⁠— the shit gonna hit the fan whether the courts find police innocent or guilty.

On Vitamin D and Covid-19 [via Marginal Revolution]. If there’s any truth in the conclusion here ⁠— that vitamin D deficiency worsens Covid-19 deadliness by an order of magnitude ⁠— then surely it is criminally negligent to not be running public awareness campaigns encouraging people to take vitamin D supplements ⁠— especially for darker-skinned citizens, adapted to block out sunlight and consequently vitamin D, and especially in sunlight-challenged locales.

All races are equal but some are more equal than others. The Associated Press will not be capitalizing the word “white” when referring to race, but will do so for “black” and “indigenous”. This was quite the decision. I wonder if they’d do similarly within the Jewish context, ie “ashkenazi” vs “Sephardic” Jew.

Victor Davis Hanson’s tone has finally changed to righteous anger:

An individual of unknown appearance may kind of, sort of, be shattering our bedroom window and could be pondering a felonious infraction. So could you send out a community facilitator to inquire?

Thank you, The Atlantic, for daring to publish John McWhorter’s eminently sensible review of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. My faith is somewhat renewed.

McWhorter holds back more than on the freewheeling The Glenn Show, where he calls it “one of the worst books ever written”.

“There is no linguistic justice without racial justice,” as quoted in The Linguistic Society of America’s open letter to call to remove Steven Pinker.

What a fakakta ⁠— China must be licking its chops as we stand around pissing on each other’s piss.

Capping off a triumvirate of essays I’ve come across in the past few days that elucidate the current moment is Ross Douthat on the successor ideology.

David Goldman produces a fact-filled yet overarchingly-theoried analysis of the mid-pandemic race-themed disturbances. Like for Palestinians, he argues it’s about humiliation. Goldman is sympathetic but not sycophantic, analytic but not caustic.

“The Problem of White Efficacy” by Rebekah Frumkin in Guernica. Totally mental.

Benjamin Schwarz decries the University of Chicago’s English Department for toeing the woke line, despite the Chicago Principles (it’s great to see my alma mater’s font again, and saying such things).

We must be facing this: David Gelertner on giving up Darwin. Like Smith’s invisible hand and even Newton’s laws of physics, these glorious, newly-algorithmic cosmologies ⁠— the precursors to our wonder-world of bitty digitalism ⁠— aren’t the full explanation.

What did Jews tend to die of? The entry on morbidity in the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906.

In the search for an interesting riff on Black Panther, Teju Cole, photography critic at The New York Times Magazine starts it up, complete with dueling translations of Rilke’s “The Panther”.

Ladies and gentlemen, hidalgos and Iagos, may it please you to join Andrew Klavan on this sharp essay through racism and religion via Shakespeare.

If you read one brief op-ed piece this year, surely it must be Of Crudeness and Truth by Andrew Klavan in City Journal. “For Nurse Ratched, read Hillary Clinton, CNN, The New York Times, Yale University, Twitter, and Google/YouTube ⁠—  ⁠— all the tender ministers of polite silence and enforced dishonesty. If Donald Trump’s boorishness crashes like a bull through the crystal madhouse of their leftism ⁠— well, good. It’s about time.” Like other forms of tyranny, at first we found political correctness amusing. One consequence of it: this risky presidency.

This 1-hour Smithsonian production is a history of America in the Roaring 20s, with amazing newly-colorized footage. Richly effortlessly narrated by Liev Schreiber, it remedies our black & white impression of this not-so-distant mirror. There are things I should have learned about in school but did not, particularly the Greenwood massacre.

Another Tim Ferriss Show link, this time a joyful 2-hour interview with Terry Crews, artist, athlete, movie actor, taboo-dispeller, celebrity, self-help book aficionado.

A week in Berlin, where all anyone can talk about is refugees, and the author observes: “All this moral unction reminds me of the reality-challenged 1920s in Europe, which gave rise to the very ugly 1930s.”

Adam Garfinkle at The American Interest waxes catholic and sensible on the runaway American health care system ⁠— or, more accurately, disease repair system.

The writer’s bias is clear but still it’s hard to dispute the gist of this exploration of Israeli chauvinism, even if it’s unfair to expect too much more given the circumstances.

Aluf Benn interviews David Mamet.

Enjoy President Obama’s excellent stand-up at the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He delivered much better than the amateurish host, Jimmy Kimmel.

Josef Joffe, editor of Hamburg’s Die Zeit, analyses Günter Grass’s What Must Be Said.

Guilty as charged: Shit White Guys Say… To Asian Girls.

Aluf Benn’s pitch-perfect response to the Israeli soldier Facebook photos scandal

The little people in America have proven so disappointing lately.

Why Caucasians are better swimmers, Negros are better runners: torso length.

Racism is about appearance and the material; anti-Semitism is abstract and about the conspiracy.