It looks like I was right

Yesterday, August 15, I wrote:

My first instinct is to treat this as a Poe.  First, this letter describes the ideal state social justice activists would love to put everyone in – crippled by shame, fear, and helplessness because of “white privilege.”  Secondly, “Whitey?”  Seriously?  The name did provide the social justice priests, Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed, an oh so conventient excuse to consistently respond to “Whitey” as they espouse their dogma.

And this was posted early this morning:

 

I wrote this letter to the New York Times under my poetic alter ego “Whitey”, a privileged cisgender white girl from Harlem.

I feel my letter encapsulates the way that all white people should feel about themselves.

Still can’t believe they published it.https://t.co/Uxd4E9cn2R

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) August 16, 2018

Of course, from her twitter account, it sure looks like Titania herself is a troll or poe, so how do we know she wrote that letter? Round and round it goes.

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The Social Justice Con

The NYT website published the following letter in a web article entitled, “How Can I Cure My White Guilt?”:

Dear Sugars,

I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of color. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.

I consider myself an ally. I research proper etiquette, read writers of color, vote in a way that will not harm P.O.C. (and other vulnerable people). I engage in conversations about privilege with other white people. I take courses that will further educate me. I donated to Black Lives Matter. Yet I fear that nothing is enough. Part of my fear comes from the fact that privilege is invisible to itself. What if I’m doing or saying insensitive things without realizing it?

Another part of it is that I’m currently immersed in the whitest environment I’ve ever been in. My family has lived in the same apartment in East Harlem for four generations. Every school I attended, elementary through high school, was minority white, but I’m now attending an elite private college that is 75 percent white. I know who I am, but I realize how people perceive me and this perception feels unfair.

I don’t talk about my feelings because it’s hard to justify doing so while people of color are dying due to systemic racism and making this conversation about me would be again centering whiteness. Yet bottling it up makes me feel an existential anger that I have a hard time channeling since I don’t know my place. Instead of harnessing my privilege for greater good, I’m curled up in a ball of shame. How can I be more than my heritage?

Whitey

My first instinct is to treat this as a Poe.  First, this letter describes the ideal state social justice activists would love to put everyone in – crippled by shame, fear, and helplessness because of “white privilege.”  Secondly, “Whitey?”  Seriously?  The name did provide the social justice priests, Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed, an oh so conventient excuse to consistently respond to “Whitey” as they espouse their dogma.

But then again, given the mentally fragile state of so many social justice advocates, it is quite believable there is a “Whitey” out there curled up in the fetal position while obsessing about his/her “privilege.”  If so, I think this nicely demonstrates how social justice ideology can induce a kind of mental illness.  For Whitey to be so obsessed and distressed by this ideology demonstrates the harm it can do.

It gets even more interesting when you consider the responses from Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed.

Shaun King: An Activist Demonstrates the Incompatibility of Activism and Science

It’s been a very busy summer for me, so I’m just catching up on some of the performances from the social justice activists over the last few months.  Back in May 2018, we had another social justice hoax. This one involved Sherita Dixon-Cole who claimed that a police officer stopped her for a sobriety test and then abducted her into his car and sexually assaulted her.  Unfortunately for her, video evidence clearly exposed her as a liar.

Of course, before the video evidence came out, the social justice activists couldn’t resist joining the performance.  Kristen West Savili – “Mother. Wife. Writer. Journalist. Bubber’s Daughter.” – did her best to originally frame the story as if it were gospel truth, using it as just the latest example of social injustice.  When  the video evidence came out, she had to begrudgingly walk it back (some).

It was even worse when social justice activist Shaun King used his popular twitter account to scream:

“This woman was kidnapped & raped by Texas State Trooper — Officer Hubbard, she is now being held hostage in Ellis County jail!”

King stirred up quite a flurry of hate and rage.

King – “Husband, Father, Journalist, Activist.” – was then forced to walk back his baseless and harmful accusations when the evidence came out.  Of course, being a good activist, he had to salvage his reputation and wrote a blog post trying to explain how he was so easily duped:

On this past Sunday evening, after being contacted by family, friends, and attorneys for a Texas woman named Sherita Dixon-Cole, I was told that she had been sexually assaulted and violently threatened by a police officer while in custody. I was horrified. Sadly, these things happen way too often in our country.

Let me translate.  He became very emotional because his confirmation bias eagerly grabbed onto the story and his activist nature hungered for the performance.

And to this day, King is absolutely clueless about why Sherita Dixon-Cole would lie:

Dawkins Helps Expose the Weakness of Modern Day Atheism

On August 7, 2018, Richard Dawkins tweeted:

Historic contingency “If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze …we should none of us be here.” Is this, 1) necessarily true for any dinosaur? 2) Necessarily true only of a dinosaur whose sneeze interrupted its pursuit of the ur-mammal?

and then added:

Why I favour (1):

Think back from own existence. Hyper-improbability of dad’s lucky sperm making it. Multiply up for 2 grandads, 4 gt grandads etc. Ripple outward back to ur-mammal.

Now think forwards. Outward worldwide-spreading causal ripple from any event, even trivial sneeze.

I agree.  Everything is indeed connected.  In fact, a moment’s introspection will tell you this is true concerning your own life.  There are several trivial little decisions you have made over the years that are a necessary part of your history because they are crucial to your identity.   For example, perhaps a split second decision to stop at a fast food place for a milk shake causes you to run into an old childhood friend and you therefore reestablish a connection.  Months later, your friend then plays a crucial role in supporting you through a very difficult time, steering you away from bitterness and toward forgiveness. That decision then helps to frame future decisions which then help shape who you are.

I mention this because it is striking that Dawkins can understand this dimension to our reality, but then, when it comes to the topic of God, he completely abandons it and reverts to superficial, almost childish, thinking.

How to Deal with Social Justice Activism

Back on Jan 29, 2017, Derrick Jensen interviewed feminist Susan Cox about Queer Theory. 

Cox explains:

So queer theory argues that we need to deconstruct all of these social binary oppositions. For example, man versus woman, heterosexual versus homosexual, natural versus artificial, nature versus culture. And we do this through the strategy of queering. And queering is basically a strategy of conceptual and categorical border transgression, in which each category becomes essentially meaningless and not distinct from the other. For example, if we take “man” and redefine “man” as not being a male person, but whoever feels like man, then we have queered that category and it is no longer distinct from “woman.” And this is seen as a progressive movement in getting rid of social oppression, because queer theory sees oppression as springing not from one class of people subordinating another and exploiting them for labor and resources, for their material benefit; but instead oppression comes from this very act of labelling these groups in a binary fashion, which is seen as restrictive and oppressive and people cannot express their authentic selves in this binary opposition.

This explains the core problem with the social justice advocacy of transgender issues.  It’s not good enough to be tolerant of transgender people nor is it good enough to refrain from mistreating them.  One must actively participate in the act of queering by agreeing the transgender women are really women.  If you refuse to participate in the act of queering, you are, by their definitions, bigoted and mistreating transgenders.  Queer theory is not truly a theory (in any scientific sense).  It’s an ideology and a sneaky propagandistic way of manipulating a person’s desire to “get along” and “do no harm”  and steering it toward an ideological agenda.

Queer Theory Pedophilia Jeopardy

Derrick Jensen is a radical environmentalist who recently gave a talk at a public library in Eugene, Oregon.  In the excerpts below, Jensen points out some of the leaders of Queer Theory were supporters of pedophilia.  It’s interesting to note that his detractors can do nothing but shout “transphobe” and “homophobe” at him:

Crying Wolf

Below is a video of a woman, Dawn Hilton-Williams, who received a speeding ticket a few months ago for going 70 mph when the speed limit was 55 mph.  If you watch the video, you’ll see the actual traffic stop because the police officer was wearing a body cam.  Then, it is followed by Hilton-Williams FB video that went viral because it fed into the social justice narrative about an epidemic of racist cops.

When watching the video of the officer and Hilton-Williams, it becomes rather clear she is not willing to accept responsibility for her wrong-doing.  In fact, she tries to make her unfortunate situation someone else’s fault.  First, she seems to think that because she didn’t personally see a 55 speed limit sign, she should not be held responsible.  Then, she implies there is something wrong with the officer for giving her a ticket instead of a warning.  Finally, she seems to think she has the right not to sign the ticket without repercussions.

What is even more troublesome is her Facebook video full of misinformation.  Hilton-Williams summarizes her experience like this: “I just was bullied by a racist cop who threatened to pull me out of a car in the middle of nowhere where I could have been the next victim of police abuse with no repercussion.”

If you watched the actual traffic stop, you’ll recognize that Hilton-Williams’ description is false.  There was no evidence the cop was a racist.  No evidence he was a bully.  He did not threaten to “pull” her out of her car.  There is no evidence she was ever at risk of becoming the next victim of police abuse.  None of these claims have any basis in reality.

It might be tempting to label Hilton-Williams a liar, but I don’t think so.  In fact, it’s worse than that.

Richard Dawkins and the Muslim Call to Prayer

Richard Dawkins recently got himself in trouble again with Twitter.  For many months now, Dawkins has been trying to repair his reputation and standing among the social justice atheists by restricting his Twitter attacks to approved targets, such as Trump, Brexit, and Christians.  But then on July 16, he strayed from the woken path and tweeted the following:

Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar.” Or is that just my cultural upbringing? pic.twitter.com/TpCkq9EGpw

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 16, 2018

This, of course, triggered an outpouring of outrage from various corners of the social justice universe.  Even Hement Mehta and PZ Myers piled on.

Dawkins would then dig himself deeper into the hole by tweeting the next day:

The call to prayer can be hauntingly beautiful, especially if the muezzin has a musical voice. My point is that “Allahu Akhbar” is anything but beautiful when it is heard just before a suicide bomb goes off. That is when Islam is tragically hijacked by violence.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 18, 2018

Lame.

After getting spanked, Dawkins has since returned to safe topics – Trump.

What’s a shame is that I almost had the rare chance of actually writing a blog post entitled, “In Defense of Richard Dawkins.”  As his original Tweet comes close to making a good point.

Laurie Penny: An Intellectual Lightweight Lashes Out At Jordan Peterson

I recently read an anti-Jordan Peterson article written by Laurie Pennie.

Who is Laurie Penny?  According to the article, she is “an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. ”

In other words, she is an unemployed attention seeker.  The problem is that if you are going to be described like this, the description should begin with “activist.”  For it is the activist dimension of her persona that is dominant; her activism dictates to her journalism, public speaking, and writing.  It defines her.

This is significant.  For as I have argued before, activists are simply modern day propagandists.  And propagandists don’t take an intellectually honest approach to things.    That would defeat the purpose of their existence.

Sure enough, Penny does not disappoint as she is a rather skilled propagandist. She wrote an essay that is over 5000 words long that doesn’t contain any substantive argument.  Instead, it is essentially a 5000 word ad hominem attack.

Doubt me?  Let’s sample from the beginning, middle, and end of the “essay”:

The Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty

[Here’s something I wrote many years ago.]

When it comes to just about any topic, it seems as if the public discourse on the internet is dominated by rhetoric and propaganda. People are either selling products or ideology. In fact, just because someone may come across as calm and knowledgeable does not mean you should let your guard down and trust what they say. What you need to look for is a track record of intellectual honesty. Let me therefore propose 10 signs of intellectual honesty.