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| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/scumbag-steve |
I haven't delved all that much into the details of NYT's "1619 project" but - given what I do know about how intellectually deranged and perverse the American left has gotten (due to the activities of the cancerous Academic Left) - it appears to have the markings of just yet another deranged and perverted (and let's face it: outright dishonest) leftist America-hating meme-fest.
The very premise is that (a) America was founded on slavery first and foremost (not genocide?) and subsequently (a1) racism - more specifically, "white supremacism" - is in America's DNA, its very oingoing formative or organizing principles, to employ Aristotelian-like language.
This kind of shit can be bewildering to ordinary non-leftist Americans just trying to go about their mundane American-Dream-related pursuits. (The American Dream is a myth, leftists are most eager to inform us.) It's an intimidating-sounding claim; you risk being called a racist or enabler of racism if you dare challenge it. The leading left-leaning daily publication of record is on board with it (to its motherfucking shame - but hey, don't take my word for it). It supposedly has some massive amount of research backing it up, from supposedly smart experts at universities. What is the ordinary, unfucked-by-leftism person to make of this?
Well, you need to pick apart the logic of it before you can even assess the quality and relevance of the historical research. For instance: what in the fuck kind of research is it that would establish that racist white supremacism is in America's DNA? Is the DNA defined by the Constitution? Slavery was originally in the constitution, so does that mean that it's there for good? Of course not. There was a genetic modification, if you will, that occurred around 1865 that outlawed slavery across the land. What's more, it was a modification arising from the original genetic program: "all men created equal, with inalienable rights...."
This basically reduces the whole "1619" case to a charge of hypocrisy and/or mythologizing of America's greatness. It's not really the Declaration and the Constitution and everything that these things ultimately made possible that defines America or its founding. Ta-Nahesi Coates will have none of that (and that's the standard involved, if only implictly). It's all and only - or primarily or fundamentally - about the slave trade and supposedly everything that flows from that up to the present day. (If one could sum up America's Racial Problem in one phrase, it might be: the socioeconomic achievement gap between whites and nonwhites (excluding Asians and whoever else doesn't fit neatly into the white-supremacist-achievement-gap narrative). Yes, there is an achievement gap, and there are numerous contributing factors to that, and the Academic Left has deemed it off-limits to even broach the subject of any inherent genetic differences that might contribute to such a gap. It's the declaring-off-limits part that speaks volumes about the (lack of) intellectual honesty among the Academic Left; if there is unpleasant truth then it cannot be studied. And we also know how the Academic Left dishonestly treats those who point to cultural differences such as those manifested in what I'll term the intact-nuclear-family gap. And we already know about Google's refutation-by-firing of James Damore when he dared challenge the Orthodoxy, proving his point for him and betraying its "do no evil" slogan. (It's hard to believe that the rationales provided by Google execs were in good faith, given the legitimately controversial nature of Damore's statement and the (clearly?) logically shoddy protests about its being "harmful and discriminatory." CEO Sundar Pichai's statement in particular looks like a chickenshit attempt to have it both ways without addressing the real issue. If the concern was that Damore couldn't be argued out of his position with reasons and evidence, then there should be some shred or other of evidence pointing to that; rather, what it looks like is that his critics are the ones who have issues with facing up to controversial yet reasoned arguments. How is all this not obvious ffs?)
Is the claim that America wouldn't have been founded as it had been were it not for slavery? Does this mean that the natural-rights theory of John Locke and others was irrelevant? What about the cultural atmosphere of the Enlightenment? Many of the key Framers were slaveholders, but also inclined toward philosophy. What's more or truly fundamental?
Does it mean that America as we know it wouldn't be around if not for slavery? That's a trivial claim; of course it wouldn't be; things would be somewhat different. But "1619" purports to go beyond triviality: the notion is that slavery was so deeply embedded in the fabric of America during its founding and early years that you just can't understand the history of this period without this crucial element. But again, how does one avoid triviality here?
Does it mean that America as we know it wouldn't be around if not for slavery? That's a trivial claim; of course it wouldn't be; things would be somewhat different. But "1619" purports to go beyond triviality: the notion is that slavery was so deeply embedded in the fabric of America during its founding and early years that you just can't understand the history of this period without this crucial element. But again, how does one avoid triviality here?
After all, slavery was such a big deal that there was a Civil War fought over it, over half a million men killed. No one disputes this.
But what do you do with that, if reinforcing the "1619" narrative is your aim? If slavery is fundamental to America's DNA, then a civil war that eliminates slavery should basically spell the end of America in recognizable form. But that didn't happen; instead, America extended its basic principles to all of its inhabitants (along racial lines, that is; the women's vote would wait for another half century). That it was a big enough deal that it sparked the Civil War shows . . . what? In fairness it shows that: (a) America does have this historical stain that was/is hard to remove, and (b) the North, at least, found it to be a really big deal to see slavery ended. (The South, to its motherfucking discredit, kept up the racist act as much as it could get away with, for another 100 or so years. Maybe it's the South and not some undifferentiated America that has more to answer for here?)
Maybe I've missed something here. As I said, I haven't looked into the details of the history that NYT/1619 are presenting; I'm examining the conceptual logic of the claims involved, as is standard for a philosopher to do. (It only stands to reason, after all, that slavery was a big enough deal that a Civil War was fought over it; historical detail would only show how this is so, not that it is so. But the historical picture also includes the Enlightenment, Locke, the principles of the Declaration - things the cancerous left works vigorously to undermine.) And I also don't trust leftists to cover the subjects of (e.g.) America and capitalism honestly; they've squandered that trust through countless distortions and droppings of context, and oftentimes outright smears (be it of Rand, or Trump, or Amy Wax, or industry/industrialists). (Here's one 1619 project headline, according to wikipedia: "American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation", essay by Matthew Desmond . How can capitalism as such be brutal? What if the arguments about brutality center around man's inhumanity to man, not around the private ownership of capital? Do leftists honestly entertain such a proposition? If so, I must have missed them doing so. Are markets inherently brutal? If so, then what does that have to do with the plantation per se?) They've taken to hurling the term "racism" around so much that commonsense Americans are now onto their ridiculous charade and are fucking fed up with it (hence part of why Trump got elected). Perhaps most significantly, I don't trust the Academic Left to engage in a serious and responsible dialectic with their critics; it is chock-full of anticapitalist, America-hating scum whose agenda is to fundamentally transform America into . . . well, probably whatever shitshow the Deep Blue States appear to be headed toward unobstructed by those pesky (most likely "racist") Republicans.
That's the context within which one should consider any such thing as the "1619 project" and what its proponents aim to say about America and its economic system. Whatever honest reckoning is to be done with America's spotty history, I don't expect leftists to be involved in that.
In other words, unless I've missed something significant, the 1619 project is contemporary American leftist practice in a nutshell - which is to say, one-sided/context-dropping, selectively attentive/outraged, ideologically inbred, deranged, dishonest, avoidant of serious dialogue/engagement with critics, and - last but not least - chock full of hubris about leftist intellectual and moral superiority.
Rather than dishonestly whining about "America's racism" or capitalism's brutality," and seemingly calling for every which new tax-and-spend program as a solution (to shore up the failures of the previous tax-and-spend programs, as if this was the sort of shit the Framers had in mind for this country), how about the Academic Left get productive for a change and promote philosophy for (all, including black) children? Then again, I can't trust them not to fuck that up big-time, either; they'd actually need to internalize philosophic practice themselves, first, and thereby stop being such loathsome leftist losers in the process. And since when would any academy or school be required to any great extent to instill in kids a love of wisdom or a dialectical mindset, or to provide the necessary research sources? From what I hear, kids these days are on YouTube nonstop, and there's lots of leads there. They sure as shit aren't going to better their lives spending their time delving into things like the 1619 project, are they?
And where does the NYT go from here? Phrased differently: What new low will they think of to sink to next? Will it ever get around to taking a hint from the superior WSJ model? (As far as opinion page content goes, if you believe that the general quality of NYT's is on par with WSJ's, chances are you're a fucking idiot.)
What this is, once you cut through all the bullshit, is the NYT and fellow lefties renewing their attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters. It's Donald Trump and their supporters who "perpetuate racism" which includes denying racism is the problem the left claims it to be, which includes denying that the 1619 project is up to snuff historically and conceptually. That's all this is about, because that's how leftists/allies/enablers today operate.
I'll also add this point: I've been pointing out that the Dems/leftists/allies/enablers have been recklessly smearing Trump and his supporters as racist. But there's another category of dishonesty in addition to recklessness that may very well apply in many cases: deliberately smearing them, i.e., lying outright. That's what Nancy Peloser does when she says Trump's border wall is "about making America white again." It's what CNN and their ilk do when they deliberately omit the context of Trump's "fine people on both sides" statement in the wake of Charlottesville. (How could they not deliberately omit the context? The omission is too fucking blatant, too fucking selective not to be deliberately calculated; they went too far, showed their hand, and got caught, is all. Fucking liars, plain and simple.) And when the likes of CNN don't get contrite and admit their deception, they continue the deception (including the deception that they are a reliable, credible source for political news going forward), and their deception continues to be deliberate, blatant, and calculated = still fucking liars. And so what does it tell you when the NYT behaves as slimily as many rightly suspect them to be behaving in regard to its 1619 project - when it unaccountably disregards its critics and stands by its selected 'historians' and authors? How much more blatant does it have to be, before we can say they are lying outright to the American public (about their publication standards, if nothing else)?
More from City Journal (Manhattan Institute) discrediting the NYT assholes, as well as the various Academic Leftist 'historians' who refuse to criticize the assholes, i.e., who enable the assholes, i.e., who are assholes. (A Duke 'historian' and her past misdeeds re the Lacrosse Team rape hoax is mentioned. It's as good a time as any to mention a proven asshole in the Duke history department, Scumbag Nancy MacLean, who lies about libertarians and calls it history [and who also blurbs Scumbag Lisa Duggan's pseudo/anti-scholarly smear job of Rand]). It's assholes and scumbags, every which way you look on the Academic Left, it seems. I might not ever have believed it was this bad, had there not been a nonstop avalanche of evidence of it.
[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe. (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.) In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...). (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith? Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.) As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other. A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production). I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving. Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.' (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]
In other words, unless I've missed something significant, the 1619 project is contemporary American leftist practice in a nutshell - which is to say, one-sided/context-dropping, selectively attentive/outraged, ideologically inbred, deranged, dishonest, avoidant of serious dialogue/engagement with critics, and - last but not least - chock full of hubris about leftist intellectual and moral superiority.
Rather than dishonestly whining about "America's racism" or capitalism's brutality," and seemingly calling for every which new tax-and-spend program as a solution (to shore up the failures of the previous tax-and-spend programs, as if this was the sort of shit the Framers had in mind for this country), how about the Academic Left get productive for a change and promote philosophy for (all, including black) children? Then again, I can't trust them not to fuck that up big-time, either; they'd actually need to internalize philosophic practice themselves, first, and thereby stop being such loathsome leftist losers in the process. And since when would any academy or school be required to any great extent to instill in kids a love of wisdom or a dialectical mindset, or to provide the necessary research sources? From what I hear, kids these days are on YouTube nonstop, and there's lots of leads there. They sure as shit aren't going to better their lives spending their time delving into things like the 1619 project, are they?
And where does the NYT go from here? Phrased differently: What new low will they think of to sink to next? Will it ever get around to taking a hint from the superior WSJ model? (As far as opinion page content goes, if you believe that the general quality of NYT's is on par with WSJ's, chances are you're a fucking idiot.)
What this is, once you cut through all the bullshit, is the NYT and fellow lefties renewing their attacks on Donald Trump and his supporters. It's Donald Trump and their supporters who "perpetuate racism" which includes denying racism is the problem the left claims it to be, which includes denying that the 1619 project is up to snuff historically and conceptually. That's all this is about, because that's how leftists/allies/enablers today operate.
I'll also add this point: I've been pointing out that the Dems/leftists/allies/enablers have been recklessly smearing Trump and his supporters as racist. But there's another category of dishonesty in addition to recklessness that may very well apply in many cases: deliberately smearing them, i.e., lying outright. That's what Nancy Peloser does when she says Trump's border wall is "about making America white again." It's what CNN and their ilk do when they deliberately omit the context of Trump's "fine people on both sides" statement in the wake of Charlottesville. (How could they not deliberately omit the context? The omission is too fucking blatant, too fucking selective not to be deliberately calculated; they went too far, showed their hand, and got caught, is all. Fucking liars, plain and simple.) And when the likes of CNN don't get contrite and admit their deception, they continue the deception (including the deception that they are a reliable, credible source for political news going forward), and their deception continues to be deliberate, blatant, and calculated = still fucking liars. And so what does it tell you when the NYT behaves as slimily as many rightly suspect them to be behaving in regard to its 1619 project - when it unaccountably disregards its critics and stands by its selected 'historians' and authors? How much more blatant does it have to be, before we can say they are lying outright to the American public (about their publication standards, if nothing else)?
More from City Journal (Manhattan Institute) discrediting the NYT assholes, as well as the various Academic Leftist 'historians' who refuse to criticize the assholes, i.e., who enable the assholes, i.e., who are assholes. (A Duke 'historian' and her past misdeeds re the Lacrosse Team rape hoax is mentioned. It's as good a time as any to mention a proven asshole in the Duke history department, Scumbag Nancy MacLean, who lies about libertarians and calls it history [and who also blurbs Scumbag Lisa Duggan's pseudo/anti-scholarly smear job of Rand]). It's assholes and scumbags, every which way you look on the Academic Left, it seems. I might not ever have believed it was this bad, had there not been a nonstop avalanche of evidence of it.
[Addendum 1/27: This helps to contextualize things more and makes the NYT project appear less destructive than I have been led to believe. (The main objections by Wilentz and others are to Nikole Hannah-Jones' lead essay/toxic thesis.) In any case what I take exception to is the notion - the very premise of the Project, as I've said - that white-on-black racism is in the nation's "DNA," however huge a problem it still is (and it is...). (And if slavery/racism is America's Original Sin, are we in the territory of religious belief here, articles of faith? Compare with Christian 'Original Sin' dogma.) As I've been suggesting throughout this blog's history is that this and other huge problems is at root intellectual/philosophical, and I find the state of the debate on these problems to be deplorable in some degree or other. A go-through of the SEP article on socialism has confronted me with the reality that the state of the public debate on this subject is pretty deplorable and that there is plenty of blame to go around (including the authors of the article themselves who almost come across as oblivious to the myriad counterpoints raised many times by defenders of capitalism or critics of socialism, including the much-despised/smeared Rand and her profound take on the human mind/intellect as the most important/powerful/valuable means of production). I plan to have more to say on this before long; for now I'll just say that I have tempered my more or less sweeping view of socialists as low-intellectual-character shitbags as distinct from not-unusually-flawed human beings with limitations in knowledge and problem-solving. Still, how to explain the debacle of 20th-century attempts at (state-planning) socialism in the face of critiques by Mises, Hayek and others; that debacle stems in great part by the attempt to forcibly impose a 'solution' on so many recalcitrant minds, when human problem-solving capacity was not up to the task of embracing the 'solution.' (Actually, I still see big-time vice here on display in the anti-dialogue AOC & ilk, but this is a politician rather than scholar, i.e., she's low hanging fruit.)]
