Katherine Kersten is still alive?

Happy Martin Luther King Day! Or, more accurately, Racism-Is-Over-Because-We-Named-It-After-A-Black-Man Day! Here in the Great White North, our big state newspaper honored the man by publishing a column by Katherine Kersten, claiming that ethnic studies programs at a university are an extremist boot camp.

You probably don’t know who Katherine Kersten is. When I first moved to Minnesota and started reading the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which is generally a good paper, two aching sores regularly leapt out at me. One was James Lileks, the whitest white man in America, who also seemed to be sending most of his columns from his cozy middle-class cottage in 1950 via a time machine (I could think of so many better uses of a time machine…), and the other was notorious racist conservative Katherine Kersten. Everyone knew she was a pretentious conservative of the William Buckley stamp, the Star-Tribune knew about her biases, the Star-Tribune regularly got protest letters about her, but the Star-Tribune regularly published her hateful opinions. I don’t know what was up with that, her presence seemed very Midwestern, like the paper’s dreadful great-aunt that they had to invite to every Thanksgiving, even though we knew she was going to bring her stale, tasteless hot dish that no one would eat because, as she would constantly tell us, she’d added a bit of mail-order cough syrup and chopped almonds because they were full of laetrile to keep the cancer away.

I used to write about her every once in a while. She complained about atheists, because obviously we have no sense of right or wrong. She was always complaining about the university, because we had all these diversity programs (I imagine that right now she’s fuming over Critical Race Theory, but I don’t know, because I stopped reading her). Oh boy, did she complain about the Muslims in Minnesota. Yet, despite constantly presenting herself as the voice of the oppressed white people of the country, she also complained about the universities cultivating a culture of victimhood.

Oh well. I guess it’s good to have a reminder that racism is not over, because the Star-Tribune couldn’t even be bothered to ask their in-house Archie Bunker to shut her bigoted yap for a few days, and because the Star-Tribune doesn’t seem to have a problem with keeping a racist turd like Kersten on their payroll.

Texas School Boards are the problem

Just listen to this Texas school board member to see why.

He doesn’t want his school district to become anything like the Houston school district, and the only thing he can suggest is the cause of the difference is…Houston schools have a lot of black teachers. I guess the way to fix the schools is to only hire white teachers.

This is the kind of person who poisons schools all across the country.

RationalWiki does film criticism?

I’m glad they do, or I wouldn’t realize that some people think Blazing Saddles is “One of the greatest conservative movies of all time!”

The basic problem with conservatives claiming that Blazing Saddles is a conservative film, rather than an anti-racist film, is that it relies on conflating political correctness with liberalism and political incorrectness with conservativism. Political correctness is an ideology-based concept that varies by ideology, for example Conservapedia has nearly completely banned the use of certain terminology (e.g., the near-total ban of the acronym ‘BCE’ and the word ‘fuck’, the latter excepted in rare cases when quoting people they hate[23]) and the banning of certain concepts such as support of evolution (despite it being supported by the Catholic Church since 1950). As the film itself demonstrates, one can use ‘politically incorrect’ terminology in the service of a larger lesson.

They also hate ligatures, which is why I always refer to it as Conservapædia.

Anyway, RationalWiki provides a thorough exegesis of the movie, maybe too thorough — it’s the place to go if you need every single joke in the movie explained. Like if you’re a right-wing “comedian”.

Fallout from the MacDonald/Philosophia trash trickles down

The journal Philosophia is only beginning to reap the consequences of publishing an anti-Semitic article by Kevin MacDonald. The editor is digging in, but one associate editor has already resigned over it.

Philosophia is edited by Asa Kasher (Tel Aviv). In response to questions about the publication of these articles, he wrote that the papers were refereed prior to publication, but that it was “a mistake” to publish them, explaining that he was “not aware of the general background of the debate” and that he is “sorry for treating the discussion as an ordinary philosophical debate.” He added that further comments from him may be forthcoming.

Yesterday, Moti Mizrahi (Florida Institute of Technology) who was until last night the associate editor of Philosophia, wrote on Twitter: “I had nothing to do with the publication of this [McDonald’s] paper in Philosophia. I’ve asked the EiC to reconsider its publication in Philosophia.” Later in the day, he announced his resignation from the journal.

The ADL has also denounced it. The author of the ADL’s article on MacDonald, Marilyn Mayo, has a good take on the issues.

“It’s not about censorship, but looking at what someone is saying and whether you’re validating views that are antisemitic or racist or promoting ideas that have proven to be conspiratorial and not true,” she continued. “Of course, in academia there is understandably a drive to present all different kinds of views, and that’s understandable — but it is also incumbent upon institutions and journals to vet what’s put out there or put it in context.”

“proven to be conspiratorial and not true” is the key phrase there. Academic freedom is important, but it’s not freedom to publish lies as if they are true.

Kevin MacDonald is pathologically obsessed with “The Jews”

Last night, I got this bulk email.

Dear Prof. Asher,

I have just learned that Philosophia about to publish an article by Kevin MacDonald, emeritus professor of sociology at CalState Long Beach, at doi: 10.1007/s11406-021-00439-y

MacDonald has long been outspoken in his conviction that Jews are driven to destroy the cultures of the countries they live in. He is a Holocaust denier. He argues that Jews should be subject to civil disabilities, proscriptions, and special high taxes. He openly supports white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations.

The paper you are publishing is as full of the falsehoods and bile as is everything else he has written. As part of the endeavor of philosophy and as part of the civilized world you as editor-in-chief ought immediately to retract it.

I have BCC’ed this email to every philosopher I know, and some other scholars, asking them to join in protesting this publication.

—Bennett Gilbert

————————————————————————————–
Bennett Gilbert
Assistant Professor in University Studies, History, and Philosophy
Portland State University

How bad could it be, I thought. I don’t respond to these mass calls for action without checking. So I did. I looked at the article in question.

Oh my god. That’s just the abstract. Every paragraph of the article is essentially, “The Jews are conspiring to steal our essence”, and the editors of Philosophia (“Philosophical Quarterly of Israel”) didn’t notice? Have they no reviewers? Do they just have a policy of allowing any old crap they find in their in-box to be published without criticism?

Apparently, Kevin MacDonald squats in his office, simmering in a constant state of hatred of Jews, convinced that they are running a massive conspiracy theory to destroy all non-Jews, and in particular, scrawling out long missives objecting to any criticisms of his past work, all dedicated to proving that The Jews run the world. What a horrible little man, and shame on Philosophia for publishing his bile, and extra shame to CalState Long Beach for allowing him to lie in the name of their university.

Here’s the editor of that journal.

I have no idea what he was thinking. Maybe he was flattered by MacDonald’s claim that he and his co-religionists run the planet?

The Devil made Sam Harris’s friends do it

Sam Harris has an explanation for why some people (but not him, oh no, don’t accuse him of being so seduced by an all-encompassing bias that he would become an anti-vaxxer) would fall for anti-scientific ideas: the Woke made them do it. Wokeness is infuriating, don’t you know, so infuriating that it makes people abandon reason.

This, of course, makes no sense, but then many of Harris’s rationalizations don’t hold up to inspection. What is this ideology of wokeness that he is blaming for everything? It seems to be vaguely defined as a recognition that there is injustice in the world (patently true), and that systems of power tend to perpetuate that injustice (also true, but a more complex issue that may we could argue about nuances over). But blaming the people you disagree with for driving you into more extreme positions, of radicalizing you, is bogus. Your position is yours. You can’t blame others for it.

Would Harris accept it if an Islamic fundamentalist said, “The establishment has been captured by an infuriating ideology (secularism) which is contaminating even the most basic scientific and medical communication. So… now I will trust only my imam”? That logic takes extremism off the hook.

Or “The establishment has been captured by an infuriating ideology (atheism) which is contaminating even the most basic scientific and medical communication. So… now I will trust only my Bible”? We can play this game of opposites all day, constantly claiming that the contrary position made me do it. It makes it easy to take disagreement as affirmation.

Also, the purpose of this illogical argument is crystal clear. Harris himself is a member of an ideological tribe, these IDW conservatives, through which the disease of science denialism and anti-vax nonsense is sweeping. See Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying and Joe Rogan for examples, also note that Jordan Peterson has joined the party.

With all of his good buddies embracing the anti-science banner, poor Sam Harris is in the position of having to make excuses for the irrationality of his clique. Sure, the Woke made them do it!

Does he even realize how familiar this religious argument sounds?

All I want for Christmas is to…fire the police.

I hope these fuckers have a miserable, broken-hearted Christmas, and an empty grieving life forevermore.

The cops are rotten, corrupt, and murderous.

Los Angeles police have fatally shot a 14-year-old girl who was in the dressing room of a clothing store when officers fired at an assault suspect and a bullet went through the wall, hitting the girl, authorities have said.

Officers also fatally shot the suspect on Thursday morning at a Burlington store in the North Hollywood area of the San Fernando valley, police said.

Witnesses told KCBS-TV that a man began acting erratically, threatening to throw items from the upper floor, and attacked a woman with a bicycle lock shortly before noon as the store was crowded with holiday shoppers.

Since when is opening fire a reasonable response to a guy with a bike lock? So here’s a man going nuts in a crowded store, and the chickenshit police decide that the best way to handle it is a volley of gunfire, killing two people.

Here’s a Christmas short story for you: “Police found her dead in a changing room with her mother.” Jesus christ. 14. Christmas shopping with her mom. Blown away by a cop doing what, apparently, we expect cops to do.

There will be no reform of the police because we can’t have happy endings anymore.

Damn. I can’t even think of that mom without tears starting to well up.

How much does America respect its teachers?

This much:

Jesus christ. Have some dignity and get off your knees and report this to the teacher’s union — and if you don’t have one, make one. This is abuse, plain and simple. It’s also insulting, forcing teachers to scrabble for what, a few hundred dollars? And why are the spectators cheering, this is degrading the people they expect to teach their children?

This is a fucked up country, and South Dakota is one of the worst.

Furthermore, this humiliating cash donation was sponsored by a mortgage company.

In South Dakota, “local teachers scrambled for $5,000 worth of cash during the Sioux Falls Stampede hockey game on Saturday night,” Annie Todd reported Sunday in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Ten local teachers participated in the first ever Dash for Cash, trying to grab as many dollar bills as they could in less than five minutes. The money, donated by CU Mortgage Direct, is meant to go toward a participating teacher’s classroom or school.

“With everything that has gone on for the last couple of years with teachers and everything, we thought it was an awesome group thing to do for the teachers,” CU Mortgage Direct’s Ryan Knudson told the Argus Leader. “The teachers in this area, and any teacher, they deserve whatever the heck they get.”

They “deserve whatever the heck they get”, which is why the mortgage company created an embarrassing spectacle in which teachers were forced to get down on their knees and scrape for dollar bills. Fuck CU Mortgage Direct.

This gets worse. The audience had to pay $15 to attend this circus, and only $5 of the admission went to the schools. Where did the rest of the money go? Was this a for-profit event to benefit CU Mortgage Direct? Were people willing to pay 3 times as much money to a mortgage company rather than pay 1/3 as much directly to teachers?

What happened to John McWhorter?

I’ve never paid much attention to McWhorter, and only gave him a bit of side-eye when I noticed that he’s one of the people who signed on to that University of Austin nonsense. But he’s a black professor at Columbia University! No way he could fall for that right-wing BS, right?

Wrong. He’s got a book out, titled Woke Racism, and it’s apparently as bad as it sounds. He’s a card-carrying member of the anti-woke brigade, and he’s written a whole book about his resentment that some people are actually conscious of the systemic racism in our country. Elie Mystal reviews it.

McWhorter’s central thesis is that being woke — by which he seems to mean acknowledging the ongoing fact of bigotry, systemic racism and the resulting forms of oppression — is a religion. Not “like” a religion — McWhorter refuses to hedge this contention with simile. No, McWhorter argues that people who advocate for anti-racism policies, racial sensitivity training and (of course) “critical race theory” are all part of a religious movement with its own clergy. (Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates have all been ordained, apparently.) He argues that this religion’s “Elect” has taken over the country and “rule[s] by inflicting terror” on those who dare to speak against it. Along the way, he warns that it is “coming after your kids” with a breathlessness that makes him sound less like a thoughtful academic and more like a conspiracy theorist looking for hidden critical race messages in the menus at Chuck E. Cheese.

McWhorter never engages with any of the actual cultish movements that are threatening American democracy. He likewise never engages with actual religions, the ones who get tax breaks and Supreme Court justices, who hold the power to take away human rights from pregnant people and civil rights from the LGBTQ community. McWhorter managed in the course of about 200 pages to claim that the woke are perpetrating a “reign of terror” — a phrase he uses twice — but devoted only three paragraphs (I counted) to the actual insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and tried to overthrow the government.

When he finally gets to those attacks, McWhorter brushes them away, writing, “As scary as those protesters were, which institutions are they taking over with their views?” He quickly answers his own question with “none.” It’s easy to respond with a list of institutions that have either been fully taken over by anti-Democratic Trumpist ideology, from local school boards to the electoral machinery of Wisconsin to the Republican Party itself, or institutions that are so riddled with white supremacists that they can no longer be trusted (like various local police departments). But note the word choice from the linguistics professor. The people who attacked the Capitol were “protesters” with “views.”

McWhorter downplays White domestic terror threats in favor of regular criticism of Coates (the imagined Salieri to his Mozart, it sometimes seems) and other anti-racist thinkers, but he believes that speaking against this so-called clergy will earn people like him the ad hominem label of “race traitor” by critics. He warns readers that some will say he’s “not black enough” to write his book.

It is peculiar that someone would be concerned about radicals taking over institutions to start a reign of terror, but neglects an actual recent instance of just that happening…except to make excuses for them.

I don’t think he’s a race traitor, and would never use that term. I just think he’s a dumbass.

Can we civilize OAN and AT&T?

If you thought Fox News was bad, don’t turn on OAN. I haven’t. I don’t even know if our cable company includes it in their basic service, although it wouldn’t surprise me if they did, given the local clientele. But meanwhile, they’re just spewing ignorance to an amazing degree

In October, OAN used Indigenous Peoples Day to praise Christopher Columbus and Europeans for “civilizing” the “savages.” And throughout the nine-month period, OAN figures regurgitated right-wing talking points about “social justice warriors” forcing sports teams to change their names from racist slurs and “erasing” Columbus from our calendars.

Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation revealed that telecom giant AT&T had played a key role in creating and funding the far-right network, with 90% of OAN’s revenue reportedly coming from its AT&T contract.

They’re giving voice to some astoundingly stupid Italian-Americans, too.

I have a suggestion for Mr Dimino of the Italian American One Voice Coalition: find better heroes to champion. It’s not as if there is a shortage. Ever hear of the Italian Renaissance? If you need a stronger connection to America, how about Fermi, or Marconi, or DiMaggio? You don’t need to attach your identity to a genocidal looter and all-around evil guy, just because he was Italian.

Led by Tipping Point host Kara McKinney, OAN treated the discovery of more than a thousand Indigenous children’s graves as a lie meant to target churches, drawing a tenuous connection between the discoveries and a string of church vandalism and arson across Canada.

  • On July 12, McKinney called the reporting on mass graves of Indigenous people at former residential schools an “odious lie” used to “excuse” the “desecration of holy grounds.”
  • On July 23, McKinney asserted that the media had “exaggerated” its coverage of residential schools, stating, “Just like the history of slavery in America gets overexaggerated in some cases in order to be weaponized to reorder society to this day — they make everything about race — the same thing is happening with these schools in Canada.”
  • Days later, OAN irresponsibly blamed Canadian church fires on “activists seeking revenge for Indigenous students,” comparing them to “American churches [that] were burned down or vandalized” by “George Floyd protesters” in 2020. (Though some suspects have since been arrested and charged for the Canadian fires, authorities there have yet to discuss their possible motivations.)
  • In a Tipping Point segment promoting her deceptive YouTube video “The Canadian Mass Grave Hoax,” alt-right troll Lauren Southern downplayed the discoveries at former residential schools, saying, “If you scratch past the surface, none of it is true.” She later claimed that “it is a far stretch to say a pit of murdered children with thousands of bodies across Canada and a gravesite that the markers have been lost — a massive stretch, and one that … led to mass hatred and hate crimes and terrorism, quite frankly, across Canada.”

Hmm. I wonder what OAN makes of this apology by Benedictine nuns?

We acknowledge the injustice done through our community’s participation in the federal government Assimilation Policy to educate Native American youth at Saint Benedicts’ Mission boarding school on the White Earth Reservation (1878-1945), St. Mary’s Mission on the Red Lake Reservation (1888-1940s) and the Industrial Boarding School (1884-1896) on our monastery campus.

Within the past two years the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict have been working in collaboration with the White Earth community, its Tribal Historic Preservation Office and the College of Saint Benedict to strengthen the bonds that continue to move toward reconciliation and peace with our Native American sisters and brothers.

It’s far too little, far too late, but if the Catholic Church can acknowledge the great wrongs done, does that mean that OAN is even more evil than Catholic pillagers and desecrators of Native American culture?