I loved this new Matt Taibbi column about White Fragility, not because it was good, but because it was bad in such an illustrative way. This is what white liberal indignation looks like, really not so different than white conservative indignation. The beautiful thing about Taibbi’s essay is that it’s so forcefully stated and insulting.…
MLK famously called out “white moderates” in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s…
I enjoyed Asterix comics and movies in childhood. I’m half-German, half-black, and my mom gave them to me during parts of my childhood spent in Europe. It’s been a long time since I thought about them, and I can’t say I particularly remember the racism. At the same age, I was getting bullied for my…
It annoys me that me that a professional bioethicist would take time out of their day to publish something like this in Bioethics: Does the heterogeneity of autism undermine the neurodiversity paradigm? It’s like an argument we’ve had a million times on Reddit, but with much fancier obfuscation. It admits as much in the second…
If we’re having a national reckoning on systemic racism, a media trend that has to go is the “Uncle Tom sympathy piece.” We don’t need human interest stories about black conservatives, gay Republicans, anti-neurodiversity autistics, etc. and their internal conflicts, in the name of balance and contrarianism and novelty. These articles are written for an…
Liberalism: A Counter-History is a very important book that’s a slog to read all the way through. It’s priceless for putting current events in context, though. Mythological understandings of history are a major problem for BOTH mainstream liberals and conservatives. In many ways, liberals are more self-deluded and ahistorical than conservatives. Fortunately, all the intellectual…
As newly woke white liberals make it through their anti-racism readings lists, we have to be ready for the inevitable: they will butcher it and try to take over the movement with their same old shit. The Week is centrism city. They publish Matthew Walther, a reasonable voice from the right wing. That sort of…
If “progressives” want to help, they HAVE TO radicalize and stop being liberals, i.e., they have to pick a side. Today’s conservatives are the true heirs of the liberal tradition, and today’s liberals are the squeamish useful idiots of systemic racism. The principles in the US Constitution are beautiful, but the fact is that they…