Monthly Archives: July 2020

Four quiet days before filing a lawsuit against the State of California this past May and with a make-or-break space launch less than a month out, grand genius and world savior Elon Musk took time out of his busy schedule to visit with Joe Rogan and put the COVID-19 crisis into terms we lesser minds could all understand. Yeah th-the- these were, these were [sic] definitely not stand up, uh, you know, if if, fsthe [sic?] Supreme Court here I mean its, obviously c-complete violation of rights. Genius language is tricky to parse even when intentionally pared down. Ever since it was revealed to Kanye West by Kanye West that he was a genius, popular media has laid supine to the myth that all geniuses are crazy and say whackadoodle things. So Mighty Musk was simply following the dictates of this natural law, espousing debunked conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and patriotically/selflessly extolling the constitutional privilege of citizens to work at his factories despite the unabating global pandemic.

That was podcaster (and frequenter of The Joe Rogan Experience) Eric Weinsteins sentiment at least. Hes the managing director of Thiel Capital and (wait for it) one of Elon Musks investors. Speaking via Twitter-thumb Weinstein recently set loose the praise, He may be wrong, but Elon Musk is a maverick and a contrarian risk manager. What were you expecting? I dont get it. Ward Cleaver? Mr. Rogers? Pat Boone? Genius is messy. More like Charles Keating, but if we follow Musks reductionist view of consciousness and human behavior (zero free will) Musks contrarian move is clearer than Weinsteins investment portfolio would have us believe. Musks neurons sensed financial trouble, and his synaptic structure produced a predetermined response calculated to sway public favor in his direction. Musks eventual lawsuit would remind reactionaries that their colonial forefathers perished for their inalienable right to ignore already watered-down health guidelines in the midst of a staggering global pandemic. But this is already written into the sourcecode, a favorite term of Weinsteins and neo-Puritan Musks, meaning that all the events of the universe have already been determined and programmed into the simulation we call reality. Why bicker about Musks actions? If his worldview is correct, Space-X already has or has not colonized Mars and humans are simply conscripted actors playing out a predetermined simulation, ironically gifted by evolution with the myth of consciousness which fools us to think were not autonomous.

Managing-Directing one of the largest investment companies run by right-wing nutjob Peter Thiels not the only hat Musk-apologist Eric Weinstein wears. Besides christening that YouTube algorithm of liberal apostate and right-wingers (Slavoj Zizek, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro) as the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), Weinsteins also a physicist whos proudly unaccepted by the physics community. Like all healthy lads on the fringe Weinstein harbors suspicions of his own genius, due mainly to his pet theory Geometric Unity. As a connoisseur myself of controversial physics/consciousness theories like Sir Roger Penroses Conformal Cyclic Cosmology and Penrose and Staurt Hameroffs Orch OR (more testable and specific a consciousness model than anything Musks brain has so far pre-computed), I have no inherent prejudice against Geometric Unity and not simply for the reason that neither I nor Mr. Weinstein could cogently summarize it if asked.

Born of the moments polygamous wedlock of unlearned skeptics, unreachable dolts, moderate right-wingers on their way toward extinction or Joe Biden, white supremacists in search of new rhetorical tactics, and genuine liberal and progressive defenders of free speech; Eric Weinstein and brother Bret have emerged as two of the leading lights of this dim web of thinkers, a new consensus politics whose chief strength lies, of course, in pretending that its not a consensus politics. (Though Brets currently trying to rally the supposed non-consensus of free-thinking followers behind his self-drafted Presidential ticket of Andrew Yang and General William H. McRaven and a new governmental structure which hes thought out so the rest of us dont have to). Have mercy on my fingers as I now transition Intellectual Dark Web to the tidier IDW. The IDW inhabits the terrain of liberal apostasy first settled by Christopher Hitchens, eminently more intelligent and valuable than any of this IDW mob despite his flaws. Hitch nevertheless showed that there was gold in them hills, and his 2011 death left behind an as-yet unfillable shoe. Largely treading the solid ground of free speech and political anti-orthodoxy, figures have been so desperate to fill Hitchs lucrative void that many of these heirs-to-be havent been able to evolve beyond a shabby form of populism that would make John Stuart Mill, George Orwell, and Sir Bertrand Russell cringe.

The conundrum for those of us who support free speech (and cause clbre to the unreachable consortium of reactionary racists) is that this ball is often dragged out just to protect the views of, say, genetics pioneer James Watson (hero of Eric Weinstein) who has said and will say again whenever you ask him that black people are genetically less intelligent than whites. Besides Weinsteins liberal fetish for right-leaning loons (in fairness, Weinstein has stated his disbelief in IQ-race correlations), the man who wants us to believe that Fox-News Elmo Dave Rubin and generally apolitical scientist Steven Pinker are in the same intellectual coalition has an insatiable penchant for creating groupings of people and ideas that just dont cohere. He considers Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk (surprise?), and James Watson to be in the same category of maverick genius, and begs the woke Twitter mob not to cancel them, nor hunt them into extinction (whos cancelling Chomsky again?). But then of course, Weinstein has no trouble turning around and applying Jewish identity politics to Chomsky, attributing his views on Israel and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) to self-loathing. He considers any notion of Israeli pullback from its five-decades long illegal military occupation, apartheid rule, and the racking up of war crimes and nearly half of all UN Resolutions against the indigenous Palestinians to be rooted in self-indulgent shame (remember that phrase for later, as its key to Weinsteins worldview in which every single progressive tenet is rooted in white-masochism). But what makes the IDW and its bishops like Weinstein appear novel is both the dementia of our waning American empire, and its practitioners application of free-speechs timeless principles to cancel culture, political correctness, and identity politics. While pious to the attack against these modern political cudgels, the IDWers forget that its also political correctness that they and their sacred enemies engage in when they refer to Trump and Trump supporters as republicans rather than fascists. Worse, they circulate, or at very least imply via their own ignorance, a dangerous myth about the origin of identity politics that progressives and/or people of color invented it and are its sole practitioners.

Those of us who tend to agree with Bertrand Russell that humans with interests confined to the short span between birth and death suffer from limitation of outlook, are aware that before the term identity politics was coined, identity politics Americain and its racial constraints were invented by Confederate white supremacists with their entire secessionist political movement based on matters racial and, cue political correctness, economical. White identity politics was then paramilitarized by the Ku Klux Klan, the first major American political group to organize themselves around a singular race and religion, and perfected by Nixon and Wallace in the 60s (resulting in the birth of the proto-politically correct term law and order), and from there passed mysteriously from white to left via a sort of Stockholm Syndrome. But before the KKK established itself around white identity and infiltrated academia and national politics in the 20th century, white was not the universal signifier of non-black Americans. In fact, those Americans resistant to whites new compulsory suffix, supremacy, made an effort to retain distinctions between the various European strands, as they did in the Old World. Thus, with Ku Kluxery on the rise in American academe, Germanic-white firebrand and Ku Klux Bludgeoner HL Mencken tellingly summarized the entirety of Anglo-Saxon history in the 1930s as a history of recurrent outbreaks of blind rage against peoples who have begun to worst him. In America today, one would instinctually substitute Anglo-Saxon with white, toss all of Germanic stock in, and the statement would still ring equivalent as well as equally eviscerating. But identity politics and political correctness have gone through so many instantiations that all and sunder believe them to have either always existed in the progressive palate, or that they eminated a few years ago on the Left. A defect of identity politics besides the intellect of its hillbilly progenitors, is that it does not level the playing field toward truth or universality but rather toward tit-for-tat. Saying I am X race and Y gender, therefore Z does not absolve a white person from saying, Yeah, well Im white, therefore Tucker Carlson. Worse, it has led to the most absurd epitome of all: Blue Lives Matter identity fused to occupation. How moistly capitalist.

Trouble is, youre not likely to confront this analysis if you rely solely on the purple belts of the IDW (as many do) for the contrarian maneuvers with which they insist you should be working over that dead horse of anti-progress-inducing progressivism. Youre also not likely to encounter this dead horse at all if you support or are part of the protests currently going on in the wake of George Floyds murder unless you listen to Eric Weinstein and Sam Harris, an IDW pundit who does believe in the correlation of IQ and race. It may risk dishonesty to call their analyses of the George Floyd protests predictable, but it is certainly revelatory of their own motivations that both Weinstein and Harris insist the movement is an extension of cancel culture. Their general argument for claiming that their sworn enemies woke orthodoxy/piety and white self-flagellation reign supreme at the protests they havent bothered to attend is confusing. Especially since theyve frequently claimed that social and mainstream medias have ruined public discourse and threaten our democracy, one might expect them to embrace the moment when said discourse finally spills street-ward due to the work of hundreds of thousands of diverse protestors. But Weinstein and Harris make no moves to engage any of them in person. Instead, they apparently harvest all their protester info from Twitter and CNN before passing their wise counsel along to fans who have largely done the same.

Ill attempt a Weinsteinism here and chock the defect and weak argument up to a quantum entanglement (thats a physics term) of a fundamental lack of understanding the moment, dishonesty, hypocrisy, and the ego-incentive of sticking to the contrarian/apostate brand. Consider a YouTube chat from June 5th, in which Weinstein claims he wants to be able to relate to George Floyd as a human yes, several of us can and do though, Black Lives Matter has supposedly disallowed him because hes white (no indication whether this was relayed to him publicly, privately, or telepathically). However, Weinstein then proves race is transcendable by channeling his inner Candace Owens, wondering aloud whether not particularly good person George Floyd himself even believed that black lives matter presumably because of his criminal record that involved only one instance of a crime that was not victimless: the armed robbery of a black couple in 2007. Then, as someone determinedly outside the movement that has sprung up around murder victim George Floyd (who, the implication is, not only didnt care about black lives, but didnt care about them as much as Weinstein), Weinstein naturally condescends to give us all flimsy mandates for our relation to Floyd and for our participation in the protests. First, he insists the only way to participate in the movement or even in the discussion at all is to claim unequivocally that the problem with policing is only relegated to people of color. Weinstein then courageously spears his strawman by reminding us of Daniel Shaver, a white pest-exterminator who was murdered by police on video a video which was shared to me (as Im sure it was with others, save Weinstein) by both progressive and libertarian supporters of the George Floyd protests, many of whom were people of color. In fact, in recent days my combined social media feeds have been saturated with posts by friends of color critiquing cancel culture (a largely white, middle-class phenomenon) and white fragility as ineffective and counterproductive measures of solidarity.

Venturing back to Weinsteins dreamscape on Episode 36 of his Podcast The Portal, we find him making sure the dead horse of cancel culture gets on its second leg. He does so by fighting identity politics with identity politics, evolving his argument to give us race-based mandates for solidarity and protests. And he would not be Eric Weinstein unless he did so from the identity of the IDWs only approved pronoun, We/Our. We outside the black community, in our maudlin guilt and performative shame, are now in the process of losing the ability to meet our own amazing sub-culture of black America as equals. Besides the curious prefix sub, and the grammatical implication that black American (sub) culture belongs to the community outside of it, this is predictable contrarian syntax. Take the truth that the purpose of the protests is to meet Americans of all colors as equals and say the opposite is the intent and the reality. More than a grammatical constraint, a view of black Americans being unequal sub to white America is impossible in Weinsteins hunky-dory world, in which black Americans have already triumphed over the humiliation of oppression. Accordingly, if youre white, before becoming part of the movement or even supporting it from social media, GoFundMe, or signing petitions to reopen cases into clearly racially-motivated murders of black Americans; you must apparently first drop to your knees in the nearest public square and perform auto-erotic self-flagellation. And again, this has been dictated directly by the, per Weinsteins usual gift of phrase, frequently wrong black community, not by his own fever dreams in which everyone is begging him to self-indulge in the name of progress. But allow the man the courtesy of his own words:

Those of us in white America who believe most in our black brothers and sisters are not going in for this groveling and performative bullshit Forgive me, but no true friend of mine has ever asked me to wear a hair-shirt for my connection to racial crimes of slavery committed by people who vaguely looked like me decades before any of my family ever came to this country. Dont ask me for reparations, to abolish the police, to repeat lines that you feed me, to kneel when you instruct, or to accept lower standards of empathy toward people because of the uniqueness of your pain.

I was spooked when I heard this. First of all, one is obliged to believe everything Weinstein says about current events because, like all geniuses, he has of course seen this whole moment coming just like he frequently reminds us he did with the financial crisis in 2008. Listeners of Erics (and brother Bret) can recite the homily of self-congratulation in their sleep. So, would my donation to bail-funds in Minneapolis be refunded because I hadnt yet blamed myself personally in public for slavery, colonialism, and police brutality? Worse, I havent seen a single friend whos posted in support of the protests or from the protests many of them Gen Zers and peers from my notoriously progressive alma mater Bennington College record an Instagram story where theyd flagellated the self, nor had any of my friends of color requested this of their Instagram and Twitter followers or FaceBook friends. HAD WE ALL MISSED SOMETHING, INCLUDING THE FREQUENTLY WRONG BLACK COMMUNITY? No. Turns out Weinstein missed the point, by no fault of his own save his predetermined reasoning powers. What makes me suspect the latter is his pulling the old Sam Harris trick of telecasting profundity by speaking as slowly and tonelessly as possible. When Harris falls apart effortlessly in his probably purposefully scant comments on Israel/Palestine, he reverts to conflating the worst or most disagreeable elements of Palestinian politics with the entirety of said nation and their apolitical, working class citizenry a move both he and Eric get their hackles up about when someone does the same to Israel (or, in the case of Harris, applies his own teachings against religious fanaticism to Zionist settlers and Israels reigning religious-right government). Its a violation of the mathematical proof that a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square. For example, Hamas is in Gaza and Gaza is in Palestine, thus, all of Palestine is Hamas and arresting Palestinian children as young as 8-years old in the Fatah-controlled West Bank unaffiliated with the Hamas political party (militarily sequestered in the Gaza Strip) is a better outcome than upholding international law and human rights, granting Palestinians a state or citizenship with equal protection under the ethnocratic laws of Israel, or, you know, doing anything at all to alleviate their suffering or prevent the frequent visitation of war crimes upon their heads. Thus, with Black Lives Matter and various groups protesting not to mention individuals, which no longer exist in Weinsteins We world Weinstein insists a rectangle is a square, cancel culture and white-flagellation are progressive phenomena, BLM is progressive, therefore the protests are cancel culture and the black community, not the white, is asking for self-flagellation. The entire movement is conveniently based on podcast fighting and the exact white self-immolating metric on which Erics built an entire brand. We indeed!

But make no mistake, Weinsteins not a bigot. I listened to all fifteenish minutes of Portal Episode 36s opening salvo, in which he brags of being as blown away by black music as Keith Richards. Per usual with contrarian nit-pickers, Weinstein acknowledges a problem of racism, but doesnt move the discussion forward at all. In fact, hes apparently lost enough cabs to stand aside on police brutality this time, We have already many times stood in shock when the cab which slowed to pick us up sped off when it saw who we were with. And I can assure you that we were never called something so genteel and euphemistic as n-word-loving race-traitors as we were physically bullied in school. He must of course have something to say counter to liberalism, or else he is not sufficiently contrarian in a moment in which some 74% of Americans currently support the protests. So instead of pushing the discussion forward, he lowers the standards of a revolution and applies it vaguely to the present as well as the last forty years? I dont know. After listening to several of his interviews and previously enjoyable livestream walks, I cant say for certain. He explains this odd, dare I say misuse of the word revolution by informing us that whats been happening for the last X amount of decades of course doesnt look like revolutions weve been through, and as a result, quite frankly, we dont treat it like a revolution. Ah, ok. And what, pray tell, is the name of this revolution that looks more like the gradual development/devolution of a republic-turned-empire-turned-national-security-state O wise physics apostate? The N^2 (squared) Revolution. So then, was the descent of Rome into the European Dark Ages the N^1 Revolution?

For those unfamiliar, Weinsteins chief rhetorical technique is a sort of incommunicable lather, sprinkled with physics terms so that the unlearned in his audience stay occupied and reminded that they are currently transcending their own stupidity. By couching all his arguments in physics jargon, the suds of Weinsteins anti-establishment brine presents itself as a Rorschach test, whereby anyone can return warmly and reflexively to their already held believes with confidence imparted by a few foreign and nonsensically applied physics terms. Oh, my reactionary racism is just part of the N^2 revolution? Coronavirus is an instance of the twin-nuclei problem? What else? Civil unrest is just the backward time-referral of a gauge metric? Black Lives Matter is a spin echo, trapped in a five-dimensional lattice? Thats all this is? Or, perhaps were witnessing textbook mediocrity? When you have nothing new to say, start wedging words where they dont belong. Misuse then appears to be novelty, for if you change the language your audience thinks in, they might mistake it for new knowledge.

Besides the facade of honesty one risk of contrarianism taken as ideology and principle is that, when you confine your entire platform to henpecking from the sidelines every nuance of every statement made by the same singular progressive opponent (Harris and Zizek are really the only prominent IDWers to go after Trump), you risk positioning yourself as supposedly infallible an outcome youd think would be avoided at all costs by people that supposedly care so much about free speech and rationality. So apparently driven to disgust by the misguided mob, you risk making yourself out to be the only unfaltering source of the truth, of the rational non-hysterical take. But in truth, you reduce yourself to a hostage of every form of reactionaryism, orthodoxy, and pretensions to infallibility you supposedly despise. Thus, when Science magazine decided to take a day off of work to educate themselves on race and analyze where they can improve their own organization in this respect, physics-outcast (therefore prophet) Weinstein summoned full scientific authority and lather to claim that the magazine and the science community which hes never forgiven for rejecting him was betraying the principles of science by doing this. That as scientists, they should instead be running controlled experiments. For both his and our sakes, he doesnt elaborate on what in the world experiments would entail. What should they do, murder a man of every race in isolated cities with a knee choke-hold and record whether the same organic street protests actuate? He then repeats his wet-dream mandates for supporting the protests, and spends the last few minutes discussing how Nature magazine and science academia can get more women and minorities into science by suggesting that the labor market be allowed to work without using VISAs as labor relief. Because all women and minorities come from outside the country? Confusing. An argument only an audience which already knows how it feels could be convinced by. (75% of which when polled on June 10th voted that this moment predictably vague but presumably in reference to George Floyd and the public response was either performative or, 44.3%, stupid.) Then, with full professionalism, Eric begs the science community to come at him, and call him a bigot. Ill refrain from the latter, as its what Weinsteins brand and wallet begs.

It is tempting for many white progressives in an age of white fragility to be the first to cancel and smear, though its equally tempting in a climate which has lately sickened of the wolf-crying and the white narcissistic rage to beg the smear. I will however, come at you with this, Eric Weinstein. Dont condescend to give me or anyone else dictates for the support of a moral cause that A., dont exist, and B., of which youre not a member nor participant. Ive been a supporter of Palestine long enough whose Israeli occupiers frequently sell arms to US Police Departments and train officers in the techniques used on George Floyd, another fact youd never know if you listened to the mainstream media or the IDW to know the importance of free speech and protest. Hundreds of thousands of people of all age, race, gender, religion, sexuality, and politics (74% of Americans are not Democratcs) are not gathered in the street to debate whether Aziz Ansari had a bad date or not. If Weinstein took a break from the daily grind of managing the investments of Thiel Capital in various weapons companies like Anduril companies that may take a few quarters knocking if protestors achieve a true demilitarization of the police he might notice this. For while billed as contrarians, apostates, and anti-establishment truth-tellers, there hasnt been a hotter take on the internet before the murder of George Floyd that is than posturing against political correctness and identity politics. See Weinsteins own recent oh shucks at the growth of followers, You just pushed us over the 200k-YT subscribers yesterday! I thought we were going to shed subscribers given our material No. In fact, its been such a popular and lucrative position to take that those whove built entire careers on anti-progressive reactionaryism like Eric and lesser brother Bret cant give it up now. Even Bill Maher has jumped in to will the dead horse of cancel culture a second wind and install it at the head of the protests, so he could lay into it. These truth-tellers apparently have never taken pause to consider that they themselves may be deeply lodged in their own echo chambers which they constantly accuse the left and right of doing because to acknowledge that there is even a chamber within which millions of IDWers are talking to each other risks ruining their brands calling-card that the IDW is legitimate because it is anti-establishment and fringe.

Whether the IDW likes it or not, America is still a democracy and theres nothing anti-democratic about a mass, sustained protest demanding things well probably end up getting in compromised forms. Abolition of prisons and police departments one need only be a realist to know that short of a revolution thats not going to happen in the short term. But prison reform? Disbanding and rebuilding police departments with a dramatic reallocation of funding toward the creation of community-based programs to deal with emergencies not appropriate for armed police? A few wetted-drawers in government and a pair of eyes are all thats needed to see that this is already happening. One must occasionally ask for the moon to wind up with the Earth, but figures of extraordinary political naivete like Weinstein are doing their best to keep wedging a square peg into a round hole, conflating demilitarizing and defunding the police with mandatory white self-immolation. Insulting his own audience by demanding that they take his word for it, kneel when he instructs, repeat the lines he feeds, and accept what we who prefer not to speak political-correctese whenever possible call lies. There are many of us who have been able to give the dead horse of cancel culture a few kicks and keep our progressive values. Im somehow able to be a social democrat who supports radical police reform, racial justice, trans rights, human rights in Palestine, and free speech. I do because I believe like many others that progressive values are most convincing when argued against their opposites. When the unending and unspinnable stream of videos of police brutality against the citizenry, recorded by citizenry of all races vindicates them. Not when theyre conscripted or forced into acceptance through shaming. Ironically, the only voices youll hear spinning the George Floyd protests this way are those of Eric Weinstein, Sam Harris, and the dim web of internet pundits who have officially made the IDW a new occasion for piety, and worse, anti-intellectualism.

Nicholas Vincenzo Barney is an American writer, journalist, and advocate for human rights in Palestine. After the death of a close friend, Barney made several trips to the West Bank and spent considerable time living with Palestinian families, reporting on the Occupation internationally and domestically for Mondoweiss and The Palestine Chronicle among others. He is the founder and editor of The Palestinian Review, a subset of The Palestine Chronicle. Twitter: https://twitter.com/nictamerr Email: nickvbarney@gmail.com

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Consensus Politics on the Fringe: The Intellectual Dishonesty of the Intellectual Dark Web - CounterPunch

A group of Black Lives Matter protesters recently toppled a statue of Ulysses S. Grant that had long graced a San Francisco park.

As a quick reminder for those who may have dozed off during American history class, Grant was the brilliantly bold general of the Union Army who engineered the defeat of the Confederacy and ended the Civil War in 1865.

In 1869, he was elected the 18th president of the United States, and during his two terms in office aggressively pursued policies to establish and ensure equal rights for former slaves including using military force to hunt down and exterminate the Ku Klux Klan that erupted early in the Reconstruction era.

The mob in San Francisco directed its sanctimonious fury on the Grant monument because it selectively focused on Grants very brief and reluctant history as a slave holder.

Grant owned one slave, an unrequested gift from his father-in-law. He freed that slave a year later at great personal cost; he was virtually bankrupt at the time and could have sold the slave for a large sum of money.

In the continuing rage following the police killing of George Floyd, puritanical political correctness has targeted other monuments to imperfect U.S. historical figures, such as President Theodore Roosevelt and abolitionist Matthias Baldwin both accused of colonialism.

Given the new, high hurdle for historical moral purity there may be few monuments left standing in America. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, among others, will all fall far short of acceptable virtue. Mount Rushmore may have to be dynamited to appease the sensibilities of the politically pious.

While involuntary servitude, regardless of historical context, is a wicked inhumanity, applying todays moralities to people who lived during a far different time can be an exercise in self-righteous anachronisms. In his lifetime, Grant did more for black Americans than have any of the wanton rabble who tore down his statue in San Francisco.

Wanting to remove public monuments to Confederate luminaries is reasonable given that the Confederate states initiated war against the United States, mainly to preserve and extend an economic system sustained by slavery.

Monuments to people who supported such selfish evil and fought and killed Americans to do so are as abhorrently incongruous with Americas fundamental values as would be monuments to Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden.

But, frenzied malicious destruction of monuments wont end systemic racism any more than will looting and burning. Changing the mindsets of millions of people is what ends racism. Pitchforks and torches are a crude form of politics that will more likely disaffect people than win them over.

And, the more troubling problem with revolution by rabble, is friendly fire. Anyone, including allies and even fellow insurgents, can be condemned as enemies of the revolution a fatal lesson learned by Maximilien Robespierre, Leon Trotsky and many others.

Just as the BLM revolution quickly expanded its righteous fury beyond Confederate monuments to include monuments to anyone not clearing an arbitrary moral hurdle, living, breathing, human beings also become targets of judgmental scrutiny.

Say the wrong thing, dont take a knee upon demand or show insufficient enthusiasm for the cause, and you can be put on the enemies list shouted down, pelted with insults and carted off to the guillotine.

This is not how a civil society behaves or how a well-ordered democratic republic should work. But is ours either?

While the frustration with Americas corrupt, incompetent and politically paralyzed government is understandable, it has precipitated desperate, and sometimes spiteful, circumventions of normal politics, like electing a demagogic blustering buffoon to the presidency, or filling the nations streets with outraged throngs demanding better. Better meaning adherence to the nations founding principles of justice and equality under the law, and honest, responsive government.

But, if we Americans dont reject the ideological radicalism that spins every issue to the extremes of a left/right political axis, we will simply wind up with a meet the new boss same as the old boss situation. We wont get better.

Americans have proven that we can come to our senses and make major changes relatively quickly to correct long-entrenched social evils.

Less than 10 years ago, what were the odds for gay rights, including marriage, and for legalized marijuana? What are todays odds of rehabilitating government, ending systemic racism and getting the police under control?

We determine those odds.

The current national awakening and explosive outrage ignited by the George Floyd fuse, is another instance of America coming to its senses and moving to correct a lingering, festering social evil.

Meanwhile, all the noise coming from the wacky right and loony left is to be expected, but doesnt have to be tolerated. Leave them to strap on their tin-foil hats while we move on.

The vast majority of Americans are decent people; rational, fair and caring but occasionally they need a good kick in the ass to get things done.

That kick has been delivered this year. The mishandling of the deadly coronavirus pandemic by the clearly incompetent, dishonest President Donald Trump, and the undeniable evidence of persisting racism illuminated by pervasive police power abuse have delivered that kick.

Tearing down monuments and vandalizing property is not only unnecessary, it is counterproductive. There is a distinct difference between a movement and a mob.

Randy Alcorn is a Santa Barbara political observer. Contact him at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

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Randy Alcorn: Monumental Mob Mentality Is Getting Us Nowhere - Noozhawk

Its not often that a man who has spent three and a half decades in public life opens a window into his truest self. But thats what Jeff Sessions did in the course of a New York Times profile. Never has Maya Angelous famous dictumwhen someone shows you who they are, believe themhad more force.

The former Alabama senator and U.S. attorney general, now struggling to win his old job back in the face of ridicule from his former boss, was praising his tenure in the Justice Department as a firm ally of the police, even as significant majorities of Americans, black and white, are coming to grips with the persistence of indefensible police conduct.

In contrasting his policies with those of ex-president Barack Obama, heres what Sessions said:

The mantra was: Back to the men and women in blue . . . The police had been demoralized. There was all the Obamatheres a riot, and he has a beer at the White House with some criminal, to listen to him. Wasnt having a beer with the police officers. So we said, Were on your side. Weve got your back, you got our thanks.

What was Sessions talking about? What criminal did Obama have a beer with after what riot?

Theres an obvious answer here.

Sessions was rememberingmake that seriously misrepresentingan incident involving Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor and host of the PBS Series Finding Your Roots.

Back in 2009, Gates was arrested by a Cambridge police officer while trying to enter his own home. President Obama weighed in on the incident, saying that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and added theres a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.

What followed was a beer summit at the White House with Obama, Gates, vice-president Biden, and the police officer from the incidentCambridge police Sgt. Joe Crowley.

The summit was widely covered on TV and in the press.

The Times asked the Sessions campaign if this was the incident he was referencing to in his remarks. His office declined to elaborate. So permit me.

If youre of a charitable disposition, you could chalk this up to a fading memory. Cognitive decline is the term now in vogue.

But I dont think thats the case.

What Sessions is reflecting is precisely the kind of instinct that leads police to arrest a black homeowner who calls for help because his home is being burglarized, or who stop a black motorist to ask how he can afford the luxury car hes driving. Its the kind of primitive categorizing that puts a racist filter over innumerable incidents on the streets, in schools, in stores.

Somewhere in Jeff Sessionss brain is a mechanism for framing events with a racial or political cast:

Black guy gets arrested by white cop? The black guy is a criminal. There have been protests and some riots in response to the murder of George Floyd? So this criminal must have been part of a riot. Obama? Soft on black criminals, hostile to cops. Of course hell have a beer with the rioting criminal, while snubbing the police.

And how does someone with such a mindset become the chief law enforcement officer of the United States? Consider who appointed him: a president who retweets a video of a supporter shouting white power and who threatens to veto a defense appropriations bill because it seeks to rename military bases named for men who attacked the Union in defense of slavery.

More than 35 years ago, Sessions was denied a federal judgeship by the Republican-controlled Senate after a series of accusations of what we used to call racial insensitivity. Sessions supporters dismissed the charges as political correctness run amok.

It turns out we didnt know the full story about Jeff Sessionss views on race until he told us himself.

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Jeff Sessions Just Told Us Who He Is - The Bulwark

I hope everyone is enjoying their Fourth of July Weekend, and doing it safely for both yourself and anyone around you. Some random things to discuss, both New York Giants and NFL-related.

I have been asked a few times this offseason if or when the Giants would hire a female assistant coach, as a handful of teams have done. I had no real way of answering that question, but honestly did not expect to see the Giants hire a woman in an important scouting or staffing role this offseason. Which they have now done.

In case you missed it, the Giants have named Hannah Burnett as Midlands regional scout.

Burnett told the team website that she does not want to be seen as a trailblazer.

I try not to think about that, she said. I completely understand and am aware that this is an awesome opportunity, and its important for females in the league. But Ive said this from the get-go, I just want to be the best area scout that I can. I want to go in there like everyone else goes in there and go about my business like a pro. Everything else will work itself out if I go about my business the right way. For me, thats my mindset. Its always been my mindset. Im just continuing to stay on that course.

Burnett has been working in the Atlanta Falcons scouting department for roughly a year-and-a-half.

The Giants also added Courtney Kennedy, a former data analytics intern, as a football data analyst.

Progressive stuff from the Giants. Surprise, surprise.

A week or so ago, we were told that the NFL would shorten the preseason from four games to two. Well, the NFL Players Association never signed off on that, and now were being told the NFLPA doesnt want its members to have to play any preseason games at all due to the health risks associated with COVID-19.

The NFLPA has also apparently laid out a proposed schedule for a training camp without games.

Giants coach Joe Judge is sensitive to the idea that players will need to be built up differently than in past years, both because of the lack of spring practices and the fact that not all players have been able to do full, consistent workouts.

Here is what Judge told me in a recent 1-on-1 interview:

Weve got guys who have full home gyms and weve got guys who are doing pushups and sit-ups in their apartment. Everyones on a different situation how they could train. I think we have to keep that in mind this year that its similar to 2011 in that we didnt have a spring, and its very different physically in terms of how the players have been able to take care of themselves.

We have to as coaches be smart about the positions we put these guys into to make sure that they can acclimate healthy and then stay on the field. Thats the biggest thing. Theyre all going to come in with a lot of adrenaline and urgency. We have to make sure as coaches we put them in the right position that we dont put them vulnerable to injuries.

Theres just things you miss as an athlete when you miss spring, when you miss working against each other in a competitive level. Its a lot of the reactionary movements. We have to make sure we build our players up physically to put them in position to compete at a full speed tempo with these reactionary movements and be able to do it effectively and be able to do it safely.

Still, I wonder if 21 days of pure strength and conditioning is excessive. Especially without games and with so many unpadded practices it is going to be extremely difficult for coaches to allow players to actively compete for available spots. My initial thought is that opportunities for players to impress coaches are going to be extremely limited. Maybe Ill be wrong, but that could lead to deserving players getting overlooked.

Also, the three days of medical/equipment points out the odd reality that players have not been at the facility yet. They have not met in person, have not gone through physicals, and have not even been fitted for their helmets.

Strange times.

I have wondered if the idea some teams have floated of allowing a limited number of fans into stadiums in viable. Drs. Zach Binney and Jill Weatherhead recently convinced that its absolutely not.

In case you missed it, here is what Weatherhead said on that topic.

Generally I dont think there is an ethical way to have everybody come back and do normal activities, including fans in stadiums, until there is a vaccine available and until there are therapeutic options available. It is very dangerous to bring large groups of people who are yelling and screaming in close contact with each other both in the stadium and coming in and leaving the stadium. It is a recipe for a major outbreak to occur until there are interventions available including therapeutic interventions including vaccinations available its not responsible to do that.

... this virus is completely out of control right now ... it would be irresponsible to bring fans into stadiums.

I also think were coming up with all of these plans and contingencies of how we can get fans in the stadium and there are communities out there that are really suffering right now. Its difficult to hear arguments of getting fans into stadiums when our hospital systems are overflowing and people are dying and getting very sick from this disease. I am in full support of leagues getting together and coming up with plans, but I think the first step is get the players playing, lets see how things go, lets see where this pandemic goes before we start bringing the community members into the stadium and putting them at risk.

If we want sports to get going again we have to start without fans and eventually once things get under control, because this virus is completely out of control right now, maybe we can start having those discussions. At this point I think it would be irresponsible to bring fans into stadiums.

I know you guys want to go to games. I want to go to games and practices, too, and that probably isnt going to happen. Im not happy about that, mostly because it will affect the quality of coverage were able to bring you here at Big Blue View.

I do not want this to become a political discussion, but my bottom line is that Binney and Weatherhead are 100 percent correct that we have to remember the context. This isnt just about football. Its about keeping as many people as safe as we possibly can. In the grand scheme of things, being alive and being healthy is a heckuva lot more important than being able to go to a football game. Or a concert. Or a restaurant. Or wherever.

The Redskins wont be the Redskins much longer. And thats probably a good thing. Even if Daniel Snyder is only doing it so he doesnt lose sponsors. There are times when political correctness is over the top, and Ill be honest that the Redskins moniker never offended me. There are bigger things in life to worry about than team names.

But, this change is probably long overdue.

Read this article:

Valentines Views: Progressive Giants, fans in the stands, preseason games, more - Big Blue View

July 4th is quieter than usual this year, thanks to COVID-19. Many U.S. cities canceled fireworks displays to avoid drawing large crowds that could promote the spread of coronavirus.

But President Trump spoke at a celebration at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota on July 3. Its easy to see why an Independence Day event at a national memorial featuring the carved faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt would seem like a straightforward patriotic statement.

But there was controversy. Trumps visit was capped by fireworks for the first time in a decade, notwithstanding worries that pyrotechnics could ignite wildfires. Protesters mainly Native Americans blocked the road to Mount Rushmore before Trumps arrival, a reminder that critics view this memorial and many others around the world as commemorating a history of racism, slavery and genocide and reinforcing white supremacy.

As I show in my book, Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites, many venerated historical sites tell complicated stories. Even Mount Rushmore, which was designed explicitly to evoke national pride, can be a source of anger or shame rather than patriotic feeling.

Twenty-first-century patriotism is a touchy subject, increasingly claimed by Americas conservative right. National Park Service sites like Mount Rushmore are public lands, meant to be appreciated by everyone, but they raise crucial questions about history, unity and love of country, especially during this election year.

For me, and I suspect for many tourists, national memorials and monuments elicit conflicting feelings. Theres pride in our nations achievements, but also guilt, regret or anger over the costs of progress and the injustices that still exist. Patriotism, especially at sites of shame, can be unsettling and I see this as a good thing. In my view, honestly confronting the darker parts of U.S. history as well as its best moments is vital for tourism, for patriotism and for the nation.

Patriotism has roots in the Latin patriotia, meaning fellow countryman. Its common to feel patriotic pride in U.S. technological achievements or military strength. But Americans also glory in the diversity and beauty of our natural landscapes. That kind of patriotism, I think, has the potential to be more inclusive, less divisive and more socially and environmentally just.

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The physical environment at national memorials can inspire more than one kind of patriotism. At Mount Rushmore, tourists are invited to walk the Avenue of Flags, marvel at the labor required to carve four U.S. presidents faces out of granite, and applaud when rangers invite military veterans onstage during visitor programs. Patriotism centers on labor, progress and the great men the memorial credits with founding, expanding, preserving and unifying the U.S.

But there are other perspectives. Viewed from the Peter Norbeck Overlook, a short drive from the main site, the presidents faces are tiny elements embedded in the expansive Black Hills region.

Re-seeing the memorial in space and contextualizing it within a longer time scale can spark new emotions. The Black Hills are a sacred place for Lakota peoples that they never willingly relinquished. Viewing Mount Rushmore this way puts those rock faces in a broader ecological, historical and colonial context, and raises questions about history and justice.

Sites where visitors are meant to feel remorse challenge patriotism more directly. At Manzanar National Historic Site in California one of 10 camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II natural and textual cues prevent any easy patriotic reflexes.

Reconstructed guard towers and barracks help visitors perceive the experience of being detained. I could imagine Japanese Americans shame as I entered claustrophobic buildings and touched the rough straw that filled makeshift mattresses. Many visitors doubtlessly associate mountains with adventure and freedom, but some incarcerees saw the nearby Sierra Nevada as barricades reinforcing the camps barbed wire fence.

Rangers play up these emotional tensions on their tours. I saw one ranger position a group of schoolchildren atop what were once latrines, and ask them: Will it happen again? We dont know. We hope not. We have to stand up for what is right. Instead of offering visitors a self-congratulatory sense of being a good citizen, Manzanar leaves them with unsettling questions and mixed feelings.

Visitors to incarceration camps today might make connections to the U.S.-Mexico border, where detention centers corral people in unhealthy conditions, sometimes separating children from parents. Sites like Manzanar ask us to rethink who counts as an American and what unites us as human beings.

Visiting and writing about these and other sites made me consider what it would take to disassociate patriotism from America first-style nationalism and recast it as collective pride in the United States diverse landscapes and peoples. Building a more inclusive patriotism means celebrating freedom in all forms such as making Juneteenth a federal holiday and commemorating the tragedies of our past in ways that promote justice in the present.

This July 4th invites contemplation of what holds us together as a nation during a time of reckoning. I believe Americans should be willing to imagine how a public memorial could be offensive or traumatic. The National Park Service website claims that Mount Rushmore preserves a rich heritage we all share, but what happens when that heritage feels like hatred to some people?

Growing momentum for removing statues of Confederate generals and other historical figures now understood to be racist, including the statue of Theodore Roosevelt in the front of New York Citys Museum of Natural History, tests the limits of national coherence. Understanding this momentum is not an issue of political correctness its a matter of compassion.

Greater clarity about value systems could help unite Americans across party lines. Psychologists have found striking differences between the moral frameworks that shape liberals and conservatives views. Conservatives generally prioritize purity, sanctity and loyalty, while liberals tend to value justice in the form of concerns about fairness and harm. In my view, patriotism could function as an emotional bridge between these moral foundations.

My research suggests that visits to memorial sites are helpful for recognizing our interdependence with each other, as inhabitants of a common country. Places like Mount Rushmore are part of our collective past that raise important questions about what unites us today. I believe its our responsibility to approach these places, and each other, with both pride and humility.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on June 26, 2019.

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National parks even Mount Rushmore show that there's more than one kind of patriotism - The Conversation US