It is now, buddy…
Tag: kulturkampf
Pieces Of Color: When YouTube’s oversensitive filters think CHESS VIDEOS are racist, will language have to adapt to Big Tech?
With all its talk of black-on-white war, YouTube’s “hate speech”-filtering AI can’t tell the difference between chess players and violent racists. Perhaps leaving robots in charge of the English language isn’t such a good idea.
Croatian chess player Antonio Radic, known to his million subscribers as ‘Agadmator,’ runs the world’s most popular chess channel on YouTube. Last summer he found his account suspended due to its “harmful and dangerous” content. Radic, who was in the middle of a show with Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura at the time, was puzzled. He received no explanation for the ban, which was reversed on appeal, but speculated that YouTube’s censorship algorithm may have heard him say something like “black goes to B6 instead of C6, white will always be better.”
“If that’s the case, I’m sure all [all of] my 1,800 videos will be taken down as it’s black against white to the death in every video,” he told the Sun at the time.
On Irreverence, or, Why the Left Can’t Meme.
At Urban Dictionary, a user named Dankulous Memeulon plumbs the wisdom of the ancient truism that the political left tends to generate inept, insipid internet memes. He describes this phenomenon as “an absolute fact: Leftists and their shills CANNOT meme, and any attempt by them to do so ends up as either cringe-worthy and biased propaganda, or [as] cancerously inaccurate.” But Memeulon goes a step further and posits an explanation as to why this is true: “a possible cause […] is perhaps a leftist’s despicable attempts to stay politically correct, like all cucks, and thus they cannot, by their very nature, produce memes without fear of offending a minority who couldn’t care either way.”
I must confess that as a bald, cis-gendered, white, monogamous, conservative, heterosexual, Christian, male, English professor in his early 40s, I am too square to claim any expertise in creating dope-ass memes. But I do study them, along with the ongoing meme war that continues to intensify. Look no further than the WallStreetBets crowd over at Reddit, who have now learned how to burn hedge fund managers by pumping “meme stocks.”
Many scholars have demonstrated the academic relevance of meme culture to understanding how digital communication helped to bring right-wing populism to a new prominence in American politics. But the circulation of political memes (and their resulting formalization as a genre of public discourse) hints at why it is that as mainstream culture moves further left, the culture also grows more ossified, more staid, and more rigid in its demands that people conform to a particular set of puritanical expectations regarding political speech.
Distilled to its essential rhetorical function, the purpose of the political meme is to expand the range of topics that are eligible for public scrutiny. Generally, this is achieved through an imagistic, minimalist lampooning of our culture’s prevailing pieties and the supposedly unquestionable assumptions that undergird them. In short, the key pathos of meme culture is irreverence: a disrespectful attitude toward the things that polite society holds sacred. Understanding how irreverence has operated in modern American life, and how the objects of American reverence have recently changed, not only sharpens the contours of the political realignment that is unfolding, it also explains why the left exhibits such inferior skill when it comes to creating internet memes.
In their sights…
Everything They Don’t Like Is Now a Public Health Emergency
Dissecting the Letter
“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” The language used here is important. White supremacy is lethal. Racism kills people. What is not written is, “Sometimes white supremacists, acting out of hatred, kill black people,” or even, “All white supremacists are culpable in the murder of black people.” Instead, the agency is assigned to racism itself. It is racism, not racist people, that is the public health issue; it is white nationalism that kills people. This is the same tactic used by antigun lobbies in their slogan “Guns kill people.” If guns kill people, guns need to be illegal. People killing people with guns is already illegal, just as white supremacists killing black men is already illegal. To advance further legal change, you have to change the language. “White supremacy kills people” leads the same people who want guns outlawed to want white supremacy outlawed. While the letter does not draw out these ideas to their logical conclusions, the logic employed is well down the slippery slope of sacrificing free speech.
“We do not condemn [demonstrations that call attention to the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy] as risky for COVID-19 transmission.” That’s weird because every other kind of gathering is condemned by these people as risky.
How ‘too white’ has become the meaningless default criticism of the morally superior elite determined to racialize EVERYTHING
Everything from US states to the classics to British TV is now routinely criticised for being ‘too white’. How has this happened when describing something as ‘too black’ would be considered unacceptable?
Have you heard of the expression ‘too white’? In the jargon of the Western elites, ‘too white’ serves as a synonym for words like ‘unpleasant’, ‘problematic’ or ‘toxic’.
Just listen to Tom Perez, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee in the US. He claims that New Hampshire is ‘too white’ to have the first primary for the election of a president. He also thinks that Iowa is ‘too white’ to have the first caucus during the election campaign.
According to the New Republic, the American Department of Justice is ‘too white’. A survey of minority businesses in the US concludes that local chambers of commerce are ‘too white’. Apparently American TV is also ‘too white’. Television in the UK does not get a free pass; Sir Lenny Henry insists that it is ‘too white’. A former head of comedy at the BBC agrees with this assessment and suggests it would not commission Monty Python today, because it is ‘too white’.
It appears that the UK’s green sector is also ‘too white’. Former head of Friends of the Earth, Craig Bennett, insisted that it must leave behind its “white middle class ghetto.” Even poor old Extinction Rebellion is indicted for being “too white, too middle class and lacking in empathy.”
The sense of outrage conveyed by the term ‘too white’ can attach itself to the most unexpected of targets. I am obviously unaware – because I did not know, but now I do – that even ‘dyslexia heroes are too white’.
Numerous sources insist that classical music is ‘too white’. Time and again I hear the claim that philosophy is ‘too white’. Some would even want to cancel the most important philosophers that ever lived, like Plato and Kant, because they are ‘too white’. In fact, virtually every university discipline – from classical music to mathematics through to history – has been condemned for being ‘too white’.
When Progressives Say ‘Whiteness’ They Mean ‘White People’
American progressives are the masters of euphemism. They don’t “censor” books or plays; they “retire” them. They don’t “remove” lessons about the founding fathers from our kids’ curriculum; they “de-center” them. At every turn, they find some friendly-sounding phrase to obscure the illiberal and savage attacks they make on our culture. But one progressive euphemism stands out as uniquely dangerous: whiteness.
Whiteness is a fairly new concept, and indeed, the question of who is white is a complex and fascinating one. For some, it is simply a description of a skin tone. For others, it is a cultural construct meant to oppress non-white people. The definition has changed over time to include Catholics and Jews and Hispanics. But at the end of the day, a white person is still essentially a person of European descent.
These latter two definitions are certainly how today’s progressives view the affair. To them, white people are first and foremost the beneficiaries of centuries of systemic racism that created a culture and society that is not only inherently racist but also beyond redemption. This is why they speak so often of the need to “deconstruct” or “destroy” whiteness. They seek to remove whiteness from our institutions and policies.
They tell us things like individuality, work ethic, and perfectionism are whiteness. They tell us to change how we teach math — make is easier, more narrative, less quantifiable, so as to remove it from whiteness and give other kids a chance, as if black kids can’t understand math. They assure us we swim in whiteness, we breathe it in. It is poison, they say, and so long as it lingers in the American air, there are others that cannot breathe.
Let us set aside, for now, the merits of these specious arguments and get back to this idea of euphemisms. When progressives say they want to dismantle “whiteness,” they want you to believe they mean some complicated sociological phenomenon. They do not. They mean “white people.” They mean they want to dismantle the lives of white people. This is a critical thing to understand because if you don’t, you are already playing their game.
Leftist Activists Try To Ban Researchers From Studying Transgender People
The University of California at Los Angeles’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior was preparing a National Institute of Health-backed study to better understand brain structures and responses among people living with gender dysphoria. The study was titled, “Gender identity and own body perception – implications for the neurobiology of gender dysphoria.” Its researchers were seeking transgender participants when LGBT activists demanded the study be shut down.
According to the physicians attempting to conduct the study, “We want to understand the neurobiology of gender dysphoria and the interactions between sex hormone therapy treatment, the brain, and the body phenotype.” However, the executive director of the local activist group Gender Justice LA objected, claiming the study “opens the door for advancing the highly disregarded and dangerous practice of conversion therapy.”
Gender Justice LA claims the study is designed to “trigger” gender dysphoria in those who have not begun treatment and therefore would be psychologically harmful to the participants. They asserted that because the study could be used “for the creation of therapeutics to treat gender dysphoria as one would treat anorexia” it could be used as a method of conversion therapy.
The California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network circulated a letter to local LGBT communities urging transgender and gender-nonconforming people to stay away from the “dangerous” study.
It’s magic!
Meet the Undercover Anti-Fascists
On the morning of Wednesday, January 6th, as supporters of Donald Trump gathered near the White House for a last stand to “Save America,” Molly Conger said goodbye to her two dachshunds, Otto and Buck, tossed a wig into her car, and began the two-hour drive from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Washington, D.C.
A journalist and online researcher, Conger specializes in infiltrating and exposing the violent far right. Using dummy accounts and pseudonyms, she lurks in private chat rooms and invitation-only forums used by neo-Nazis, militias, Proud Boys, and other right-wing extremists. When she sees someone make threats or plan for violence, she screenshots the person’s messages, digs up the person’s real identity and employer, and publishes her findings on her Twitter account, @SocialistDogMom, where she has more than 110,000 followers.
Hellbound and Down 
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