[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
4:09 Why crime will spike as police pull back 10:26 “Blue flu” 14:11 Stats undercut narrative of systemic police racism 25:47 Toppling of statues, including Union general Ulysses. S. Grant 40:26 Liberal/internationalist left institutions are now turning on their own. 44:13 Hypocrisy of the establishment
Thamster engaged in terrible strawman misrepresentations of what is being done with pragmatism, describing it as “mere” pragmatism, and the “post modern” mere choice of identity: viz the original practicality of moral concerns is not mutually exclusive to depth of concerns nor even their idealization, sacralization and inspiration, inbornness and non-negotiableness. ....while Christianity has had great practical utility from its onset: for our enemies as a red caping of our moral order.
Thamster WitNat
Highlighted reply
Thamster WitNat
44 minutes ago (edited)
lol strawman, hardly. You are the one misrepresenting here.
I was referring to a tendency for many in the “dissident right” (if we want to go with that as a broad term) to engage in the question of religion by stating we need to either find one or create one more conducive to our politics. Packaged with that is the idea that religion serves as a survival mechanism where you pick and choose aspects of them suited to that end. The reason for this view of religion? A pragmatic concern with constructing one more in line with our politics. In other words, reducing religious truth to our own political interests. That is hardly a genuine answer to the problem but its a common one I see in these circles. Pragmatic because the question of truth is decided on by its practical implications over its absolute commitments. I am not talking about PRAGMATISM as a philosphy, I am talking about the pragmatic aim of this view in a general sense. Obviously stating that religion can have practical concerns as well as sacralization and ideaization that is non-negotiable is completely beside the point.
I also never said the postmodern “mere” choice of identity” I said this view of religion plays (broadly) within the framework of postmodernism that fascists are seemingly opposed to. Of course, for that to make sense, you would have to agree with me that the bulk of postmodernism is a continuation of modernism even if it began as a critique of it. I have expounded this view elsewhere.
Daniel Sienkiewicz
Daniel Sienkiewicz
14 minutes ago (edited)
@Thamster WitNat
“lol strawman, hardly. You are the one misrepresenting here.
I was referring to a tendency for many in the “dissident right” (if we want to go with that as a broad term) to engage in the question of religion by stating we need to either find one or create one more conducive to our politics.”
While those on the dissident right may have a superficial idea as to the process of religion, I’m gathering that I did not misrepresent your argument, as I am satisfied that a religion, as any moral ordering, has practical matters negotiated between people at its origin.
The difference between an authentic religiosity as opposed to an affectation adopted or imposed (as in the case of Christianity) is that it emerges out of the concern to connect and hold to account a group’s systemic relations (you know the etymology re-ligia). Whereas Christianity tethers us to Noahide law, an affectation of kosher imposition, jurisdiction and expropriation.
“Packaged with that is the idea that religion serves as a survival mechanism where you pick and choose aspects of them suited to that end.”
You don’t pick and choose what has survival value to your people, but you do sacralize what is crucial and make taboo what is harmful.
“The reason for this view of religion? A pragmatic concern with constructing one more in line with our politics. In other words, reducing religious truth to our own political interests.”
In this argument you are relying too much on the word “mere”, which is the strawman element….“mere” pragmatism, “mere” politics, “mere” construction.
“That is hardly a genuine answer to the problem but its a common one I see in these circles.”
Obviously I am not going to defend people in the “dissident right” and your point is well taken regarding the adoption of Orthodox Christianity and probably in regard to some of their larpish attempts to represent pagan religions.
But the recognition of the need for a religion, to facilitate our group pattern on a semi transcendent level, beyond the unworthiness of some of our people and the imperfection of the rest of us, is necessary for many reasons, not least of which is to carry us beyond cynicism for the fact of our imperfection (to say the least).
“Pragmatic because the question of truth is decided on by its practical implications over its absolute commitments. I am not talking about PRAGMATISM as a philosphy, I am talking about the pragmatic aim of this view in a general sense.”
Let me call attention to Kant’s use of the word “practical” when discussing the topic of morality.
I’ll cop to a bit of No-true-Scotsmanning here when I suggest that it is furthermore practical to have ideals and aesthetic inspiration.
The purpose of this exercise is to relocate our agency in the service of our interests; that we can have hope to re-establish a moral order which centers the biological interest of our species. ...not so much to defend pragmatic philosophy, commendable though it is: Hilary Putnam, “the great contribution of the pragmatists is to show that fallibilism and anti-skepticism are compatible.”
“Obviously stating that religion can have practical concerns as well as sacralization and ideaization that is non-negotiable is completely beside the point.”
...well, if your point is to say that people on the dissident right are prone to retain the liberal idea of shopping around, picking and choosing, yes, good point, among the several reasons that you are interesting to listen to…..
But if your point is to criticize post modern philosophy and pragmatism as they should be understood in underpinning White interests, then not besides the point.
“I also never said the postmodern “mere” choice of identity” I said this view of religion plays (broadly) within the framework of postmodernism that fascists are seemingly opposed to.”
Ok, fair enough point - If - if their understanding of postmodernity is the hyper-relative, dada deconstructionist, ironically adopted situational nonsense that its been red caped for Whites as being what “post modernity” truly is. Then agreed.
“Of course, for that to make sense, you would have to agree with me that the bulk of postmodernism is a continuation of modernism even if it began as a critique of it. I have expounded this view elsewhere.”
Not exactly. Post modern philosophy as it is misrepresented is really a continuation of modernity, its late stage fallout - misrepresented as “post modernity” since the antagonists to our interests do not want us to understand the accurate purpose of post modern performance requirements as it would facilitate our systemic survival as opposed to the ravages of modernity, its arbitrary experimentalism in promise that change necessarily leads to progress, and as opposed to maintaining traditions, where they are anachronistic and no longer serviceable..
And conversely, to be able to invoke the best of modern advance and tradition without the pangs of self loathing for the appearance of lacking modern sophistication, but mostly, to be able to protect our inherited forms, the maintained organization of which requires that post modernity be properly understood: hence why it is that our adversaries have perpetuated the hyper relative misrepresentation: they want to keep us disorganized.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 25 July 2020 06:50.
Bari Weiss resigns from NY Times for their witch trial justice.
mancinblack says:
In an ordinary crime, how does one defend the accused ? One calls up witnesses to prove his innocence. And witchcraft is ipso facto, on its face and by its nature an invisible crime. Now we cannot hope the witch will accuse herself ; granted? Therefor, we must rely upon her victims - and they do testify, the children certainly do testify.
It’s to be hoped that the FBI and state prosecutors do have some actual evidence for the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, rather than relying on the numerous allegations made against her by ‘survivors’ - a wondrously American way of describing victims (cue Gloria Gaynor) for some of the allegations might make the casual observer feel a little sceptical.
According to Annie Farmer, in order to satisfy Epstein’s lust, Maxwell had to “recruit three girls a day”. That’s twenty one a week and at least ninety in a calendar month. Goody Maxwell would have needed to spend from dawn of day to blink of night at her grooming wheel, without so much time as to even phone her accountant, just to keep up with demand.
Sarah Ransome, who was a 22 year old when she claims she was trafficked by Epstein said
When Jeffrey wanted me, you know, Sara Kellen [Maxwell’s neophyte] or Ghislaine would call me into his bedroom, and I had no choice but to go
What witchery is this? Ransome had no choice. She had to obey the commands of the monster Maxwell and her dark sister.
Did I say ‘monster’? well, a ‘Jane Doe’ survivor described Maxwell as “a predator and a monster”. Annie Farmer called her “a sexual predator” while Farmer’s sister Maria said “Maxwell would turn on a dime into a very malicious, brutal human being”. Some menopausal women can appear that way sometimes. It’s not that unusual.
“William Steel”, not his real name, who is an ex-jewel thief turned writer , claims Epstein and Maxwell “made him watch videos to prove they ‘owned’ people”. They seemed to be remarkably open and cavalier about their operations and only “William Steel” could explain why they felt it necessary to impress him.
A couple of days ago, lawyers representing Maxwell were moved to file a letter of complaint to US District Judge Allison Nathan saying
The Government, its agents, witnesses and their lawyers have made, and continue to make, statements prejudicial to a fair trial
In reply, Lisa Bloom, who represents five ‘survivors’ said that Maxwell’s accusers “will never be silent. Once empowered, women never go back to being victims”. Maxwell would be the exception to that rule, then.
For her part, Maxwell remains defiant in maintaining her innocence, which suggests that she knows there is no hard evidence against her either because it has been destroyed or because none existed to begin with. If this is so, then the FBI must be hoping that the pressure of twelve months in jail awaiting trial will make Maxwell crack and give up some names. Not that those names would be made public. It’s more likely they would be retained by the US intel services for use in their own blackmail schemes. However, Maxwell may simply ask for “more weight”.
If Maxwell ends up with a witch trial, she will still fair better than the police officers who have been charged in the Floyd case. They have already been found guilty by the same government and its agents, the MSM and a global public who appear to have added ergot to their lockdown diet. All the officers will get is a show trial. Another opportunity for the descendants of Tituba to flex their huge sense of entitlement and foreshadow another global orgy of virtue signaling and sado-masochistic self flagellation of white liberals.
As nationalists, for obvious reasons, we should want sound jurisprudence to be maintained in our countries . That a fair trial cannot be taken for granted in the country that prides itself on being the leader of the free world is beyond disgusting. Everyone, regardless of their alleged crimes, deserves the right to a fair trial, free from political interference and Woke culture. Although, as we know, a court case is not the only way a life can be destroyed and a reputation shredded.
Woke Matthew Hopkins Rides Out
Social media infractions aside, there is a growing trend for people making accusations against work colleagues, with the same relish and enthusiasm their seventeenth century ancestors displayed when accusing their neighbours of practicing the Dark Arts. The adoption of the African American #MeToo and #BLM movements by white liberals has made and will continue to make, this phenomenon worse. It seems no one is immune. Recent victims include the Jewish centrist writer at the NYT, Bari Weiss, for not being Red enough. Author JK Rowling, who was devoured by the creatures she created for having the temerity to say that womanhood has a biological basis ; and the US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, who was investigated by US officials following accusations that he had made “generalised comments about black men”.
The only salvation for the accused is to confess their sins, prostrate themselves and apologize profusely and if at all possible, implicate another person. If it is a black life that has taken offence, only taking the knee before kissing the anus of a black male will suffice. At midnight after walking thrice widdershins around an old oak tree.
There will be a pointy reckoning one day but until then, although you cannot see the yellow bird in the rafters, you must believe it is there. Or Else.
After all that darkness, here’s a piece of music to lighten things up. A little. Be True.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 22 July 2020 06:37.
Paleoconservatism as “Cultural Controlled Opposition” in response to Neo-Conservatism and its Clean Break Memo.
They typically come across as your best asset. If you recognize it for what it is and keep it on the radar screen as such, not getting caught up, controlled opposition can have its utility as they are often funded to provide valuable resource, typically enlisting intelligent people and allowing them fine and clear articulation of some important information for WN. Nick Fuentes nicely articulates Israeli Operation Clean Break, a.k.a., “Project for a New America Century.”
Although Nick’s Paleoconservatism is not what most people consider to be classic controlled opposition, make no mistake. While we are tossing around the word “culture” of late, adding “cultural capitalism” and “cultural nationalism” on the radar screen with cultural Marxism, it can be said quite accurately that Paleoconservatism is a “cultural controlled opposition”.... a bit softer and more flexible perhaps than classic, but undoubtedly allowing the enemies of European peoples to act on key points.
EBL 31: Michel Foucault “The Birth of Biopolitics” (with Alex McNabb)
Thamster WitNat
2.96K subscribers
The EBL crew is joined by special guest Alex McNabb for a discussion of Michel Foucault’s 1978-79 series of lectures titled “The Birth of Biopolitics”. The crew examines facets of neoliberalism in the light of Foucault’s classic treatise
I stopped reading Foucault after the first book of his that I read, The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure.
I was intrigued by the title, which indicated a classical Epicurean inquiry, a worthy avenue it seemed to me. However, except for the provocatively useful, but un-elaborated upon term, “bio-power”, there wasn’t much that i found to be of use in the text. On the contrary, I found him coming back repeatedly to the idea that (some) ancient Greeks (allegedly) considered homosexual pedophilia normal as transparent justification for his own predilection among this contextual relativization of history.
Even so, the term “bio-power” provides a clue as to an angle that can be used in inquiry and warning as to how it is that Africans can be a danger, i.e., not merely antagonistic, but having capacity, dangerous capability ...e.g., as a people some 200,000 years evolved prior to and thus compared to the precarious 41,000 years of European evolution.
There are several advantages to this angle which I will not elaborate on, but only add that it helps to mitigate against the Nazophiles who try to minimize black antagonism, looking upon themselves and their singular concern for the J.Q. as the ultimate in sophistication (and not naivete).
It also goes to show that sometimes a book a thousand pages long can be justified by one term or even the title.
While I had always meant to read Foucault’s most important books, Discipline and Punish and Birth of the Clinic for the provocative angles that Foucault takes on social problems, I never got around to it having been turned off enough by Foucault’s pedophilia apologetics and having read enough people quoting the texts to get the idea…
However, they have a decent discussion in and about what Foucault’s lecture on bio-politics does talk about - neo-liberalism…
....“the market (and its infamous ‘magic hand’) becomes the space of truth.”
....while the panel ventures some into Birth of The Clinic and Discipline and Punish.
Again, I’m not endorsing Foucault but he does provide provocative angles, prompting ways to think about power relations and their historical context in the determination of how social problems come to count.
by Angelo Codevilla for The American Mind, 17 July 2020:
Panicked by fears manufactured by the ruling class, the American people assented to being put essentially under house arrest until further notice, effectively suspending the habits, preferences, and liberties that had defined our way of life. Most Americans have suffered economic damage. Many who do not enjoy protected status have had careers ended and been reduced to penury. Social strains and suicides multiplied. Forcibly deferring all manner of medical care is sure to impose needless suffering and death. In sum, the lockdowns’ medical and economic dysfunctions make for multiples of the deaths and miseries of the COVID-19 virus itself.
Outside of the few who have gained (and are still gaining) power and wealth from the panic, Americans are asking what it will take to end this outrage—not to modify it with any “new normal” decided by who knows whom, on who knows what authority. Since no one in authority is leading those who want to end it, Americans also wonder who may lead that cause. What follows suggests answers.
What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.
Truth
Truth Since obfuscation, pretense, and lies concerning the COVID-19 are the effective agents of the panic and of the seizure of arbitrary power, truth and clarity about it are the foundational requirements for escaping its effects. Here is a dose.
From early March 2020 on, the best-known authorities on epidemics—the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control—presented the COVID-19 respiratory disease to the Western world as a danger equivalent to the plague. But China’s experience, which its government obfuscated, had already shown that the COVID-19 virus is much less like the plague and more like the flu. All that has happened since followed from falsifying this basic truth.
Our “best and brightest,” at first having minimized fears of person-to person contagion during January and February, during which the disease spread from China to the West, then declared that the virus is unusually contagious, and posited—on zero factual basis—that it would kill up to one in twenty persons it infected—5% infection/fatality rate (IFR). Based on that imagined fatality rate, they adopted mathematical models from Britain and the University of Washington that predicted that up to two million Americans would die of it.
The U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were based. Its model also predicted COVID deaths for un-locked-down Sweden. On May 3 it wrote that, as of May 14, Sweden would suffer up to 2800 daily deaths. The actual number was below 40. Whether magnifying this falsehood was reckless or willful, it amounted to shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater. What justifies listening to, and paying, people who do that kind of science?
Establishing any infectious disease’s true lethality is characteristically straightforward: test a large sample of the population proportionately representative of location, age, sex, race, socioeconomic categories. Follow up with the subjects a month later to add up the rate of infections and learn the results thereof. Period. Today, we still lack this definitive, direct knowledge of COVID’s true lethality because bureaucrats have prevented widespread testing for the purpose of firmly establishing the one figure that matters most. That is because that figure’s absence allows them to continue fearmongering.
Statues toppled, buildings renamed, curricula “decolonized,” staff fired. The protests following George Floyd’s killing have emboldened cultural revolutionaries in America and Europe. The iconoclasts are changing minds, and could be in a position to enact a root-and-branch reconstruction of America into something completely unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants. Imagine a country whose collective memory has been upended, with a new constitution, anthem, and flag, its name changed from the sinful “America” to something less tainted. Far-fetched? Not according to data I have collected on what liberal white Americans actually believe. Only a renewed American cultural nationalism can resist it.
According to multiple surveys, the effect of the riots which occurred at around the same time as the BLM protests is quite different from what occurred with previous waves of rioting. First, many of the participants in the major riots were white. Second, there has been no clear call for Nixonian law and order following the riots, but rather greater public acceptance of the BLM movement’s unsupported claims that contemporary structural racism explains why police shoot unarmed black men or violent crime plagues inner-city neighbourhoods. While 57 percent of Americans disagree with the protestors’ radical slogan, “defund the police,” an astounding 29 percent support it. This is so despite the deaths of a number of black people during the riots and the fact the riots have coincided with a steep rise in the number of black homicide deaths in inner-city neighbourhoods due to a “Ferguson Effect” of police reducing their presence in these areas.
Meanwhile Trump is polling well down after the riots, having dropped 2.5 points to Biden since Floyd’s death on May 25th. Trump’s repeated mistruths, unstatesmanlike behaviour and nepotistic employment of family members may have eroded the truth-based environment to such an extent that evidence-free shifts in issue position become increasingly easy. His sinking popularity tarnishes issue positions associated with his presidency, even when they are backed by the weight of evidence—as with the idea that indiscriminate police brutality rather than racism accounts for violence against unarmed blacks. The power of corporate and celebrity endorsement, magnified by “trendy” social media herding, has resulted in unusually high approval among whites for the activities of the rioters. This is an important departure from what occurred during, for example, the late 60s race riots, 1992 Rodney King riots, or even the 2014 Ferguson riots.
Statues, memory, and the social construction of harm
Progressive scholars are fond of emphasizing the socially-constructed nature of perceived reality. This is overstated, of course. Human minds are not blank slates. Gender can’t be readily reconstructed to make males dominate the caring professions and females the majority of ditch-diggers. Similarly, Americans can’t easily be convinced they are actually Russians.
But you don’t need to follow social construction to its postmodernist extreme to acknowledge that social construction does play a role in how we perceive the world. To a partial extent, there really is a “social construction of reality,” as Berger and Luckmann put it. Psychological research, for example, shows that flagging certain issues repeatedly, or framing them in particular ways, affects attitudes and feelings.
Let me interject here to make a correction in Kaufmann’s assessment of the abuse of social constructionism. The agentive aspect of social constructionism can be overstated [and I am sure that “progressive scholars” like to do that], but this would be an abuse of social constructionism indeed. As I like to emphasize, there are three important aspects to proper deployment of social constructionism: 1) The more literal, for example, as in people constructing a building together. 2) The metaphoric, for example, “a couple and a village socially constructing a child together”...or the social (re)construction of the narrative of a people’s history and 3) Post Hoc attribution as to how more brute facts come to count - e.g., fact, ‘my cousin was hit by lightning and killed’ but now there is a negotiation (social construction) as to whether the lightning strike was an act of god or triggered by events of physics; whether he has gone to heaven or is now just worm food, up for beatification or a good riddance, etc. ...is there something to be done to prevent lightning strikes or not?
...and poignantly, the fact of immigration, to be treated like a force of nature, a flow (as our enemies might like us to passively accept it), something that just happens? or rather an egregious social policy instantiated by hostile and irresponsible elites?
For Kaufmann to say that “social constructionism is overstated” is not accurate then. He might say with accuracy, that the agentive aspect of social constructionism can be overstated where it might attempt to say that it can make just whatever it likes of brute facts. But then that is neither particularly social nor anti-Cartesian indeed, but rather solipsistic, violating the corrective raison d’être of social constructionism and its means to harness social accountability.
Besides a red caping for the sake of Jewish interests, to dissuade Whites from this vital instrument (viz. for Whites to organize as a group), I believe much of the abuse of social constructionism has to do with the university being in the big business of selling talk and undergraduates being the paying customers that can be lured into liberal tenured professors’ language games by appealing to them with an “empowering” sense of overstated agency and liberal activism.
That correction at hand, back to Kauffmann
What society chooses to focus on and care about, the emotions it feels, the objects it sacralizes, the boundaries between groups, vary a lot across time and place. For instance, choosing not to shake someone’s hand is offensive in Western culture, but not in Japan, where a bow is the common greeting. Leaving food on one’s plate is treated as an insult in Japan, but not in the West. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning show that in Western elite culture in 1800, as in violent inner-city neighborhoods today, insults were treated as violence, which can only be avenged by physical violence. But for most of us, who haven’t been inculcated into a touchy honor culture, verbal slights don’t carry the same emotional punch. We either ignore them or respond with a counter-insult. As the sociology of emotions tells us, the way societies and individuals emotionally respond to words is, to an important degree, socially constructed.
The same sensitizing dynamic works for history, literature, film, statues, and even words. Like Red Guards with a hair-trigger sensitivity for sniffing out the bourgeois, today’s [*internationalist left ergo liberal-modernist] offense archaeologists outdo each other in trying to reframe the world as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and so on. Turning the principle of charity on its head, they insist on the most suspicious interpretation of a person’s motives when the subject matter is associated with their canonical totems of race, gender, sexuality. A Hispanic man flicking his fingers outside his truck window gets fired because this was photographed, tweeted, and spun as the “OK” white power sign. The result is an atmosphere where inter-personal trust is as low as humanly possible while discursive power flows to the accuser. The new cultural revolutionaries have constructed our emotional and conceptual reality.
Once “harm”, “racism” and other concepts become unmoored from reality, more of the world is remade. Statues which were long ignored become offensive. Complex historical figures like Jefferson or Churchill, who embodied the prejudices of their time, or elites like Columbus or Ulysses Grant, whose achievements had both positive and negative effects, are viewed through a totalizing Maoist lens which collapses shades of grey into black and white. If a historic personage transgressed [liberal internationalist] left-modernist sacred values, their positives instantly evaporate and activists myopically focus on their transgressions.
Suddenly, an entire Orwellian world opens up: place names, history books, statues, buildings. When you’re equipped with the anti-racist hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. In this brave new world, it doesn’t matter whether a symbol like the Rhodes Scholarship has acquired a completely different meaning, or whether a statue has become a symbol of something completely different. All must be levelled to bring forth utopia.
What has occurred across the West, especially in the English-speaking world, is a steady [liberal internationalist] left-modernist march through the institutions. Beginning in the 1960s, former radicals entered universities and the media, capturing the meaning-producing machines of society. Once boomers became the establishment in the 1990s, the ethos of institutions started to shift. For good and ill, equality and diversity rose up the priority list. As these ideas filtered through Schools of Education and into the K-12 curriculum, older ideas of patriotism faded and the new critical theory perspective began to replace it. Sixty three percent of millennials (aged 22–37) now agree that “America is a racist country,” nearly half say it is “more racist than other countries” and 60 percent that it is a sexist country. Older generations are less radical, but 40–50 percent of boomers and Gen Xers agree with these statements, reflecting the long march of the [Internationalist Marxist] Left through American culture.
The deculturation of America
In order to find out how willing liberal Americans are to jettison the country’s cultural identity, I decided, on May 7th, to ask what I thought were outlandish questions—almost to the point of inflicting a Sokal Squared-style hoax on survey respondents. The answers I received amazed me. I then repeated the exercise on June 15th, after the George Floyd killing and subsequent protests to see whether things had gotten even crazier. It turns out they have.
After the preface, “To what extent do you think that the following should be done to address structural barriers to race and gender equality in America,” I presented 16 statements that an amalgamated sample of 870 American respondents could agree or disagree with. The sample is not representative of the American population—I used the Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific Academic survey platforms that thousands of academics use. Respondents on these platforms lean young, liberal, and white. But as this is precisely the group I wished to study, this is not a major limitation. Indeed, I have removed conservatives and centrists to focus only on liberals. Liberals are defined as those who rate themselves as a one “very liberal” or two “liberal” on a five-point scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” The liberal sample, consisting of 414 people, was 86 percent white and 53 percent male. Forty percent of liberals identified as “very liberal” and the other 60 percent as just “liberal.”
Responses ranged on a seven-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” I’ve simplified the seven categories into a binary agree-versus-disagree score. Those who scored a four—“neither agree nor disagree”—were dropped from the analysis, permitting me to gauge where the balance of committed opinion lies.
Here is what I asked people to agree or disagree with:
1. Rebalance the history taught in schools until its voices and subjects reflect the demographics of the population and heritage of Native people and citizens of color.
2. Move, after public consultation, to a new American anthem that better reflects our diversity as a people
3. Rename our cities and towns until they match the demographics of the population
4. Rebalance the art shown in museums across the country until an analysis of content shows that it reflects the demography of the population and perspective of Native people and citizens of color
5. Move, after an open public process, to a new name for our country that better reflects the contributions of Native Americans and our diversity as a people
6. Rename our states until they better reflect the heritage of Native people and citizens of color
7. Gradually replace many older public buildings with new structures that don’t perpetuate a Eurocentric order, until a more representative public space is achieved
8. Respectfully remove the monument to four white male presidents at Mount Rushmore, as they presided over the conquest of Native people and repression of women and minorities
9. Allow our public parks to return to their natural state, before a European sense of order was imposed upon them
10. Move, after public consultation, to a new American flag that better reflects our diversity as a people
11. Consider adopting a new national language, that will be forged from the immigrant and Native linguistic diversity of this country’s past
12. Remove existing statues of white men from public spaces until the stock of statues matches the demographics of the population
13. Gently remodel the statue of liberty to make it better reflect the diversity of America
14. Rename our streets and neighbourhoods until they match the demographics of the population
15. Move, after public consultation, to a new American constitution that better reflects our diversity as a people
16. Begin changing the layout of our cities, towns, and highways, moving away from the grid system to follow the more natural trails originally used by Native people
Bari Weiss resigns from NY Times for their witch trial justice.
