Red Mosquito

B wrote:

Bi_3 wrote:From this perspective, the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to.

I've read this argument many times in How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, I'm Still Here by Austin Channing Brown, Race For Profit by Keeanga-Yamahtth Taylor, and Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson.

Bi_3 wrote:Instead, the Constitution is a document fundamental to denying rights to those deemed ineligible, and justifying the ownership of enslaved persons. Your symbol of freedom and equality is nothing more than a tool of repression, postmodernists argue. Failures, even at the margins, expose the hypocrisy of the whole, and define it as a lie.

I read this argument today, by Bayta Ungar-Sargon.

If you say that the left says things that they do not say, you're not owning them. You're just making shit up.

So if the first is true, and "the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to", what is it?

Why do you assume it’s a tool of repression? (The author, not you). Can’t it be a progressive document that allowed for change?

Bi_3 wrote:

B wrote:

Bi_3 wrote:From this perspective, the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to.

I've read this argument many times in How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, I'm Still Here by Austin Channing Brown, Race For Profit by Keeanga-Yamahtth Taylor, and Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson.

Bi_3 wrote:Instead, the Constitution is a document fundamental to denying rights to those deemed ineligible, and justifying the ownership of enslaved persons. Your symbol of freedom and equality is nothing more than a tool of repression, postmodernists argue. Failures, even at the margins, expose the hypocrisy of the whole, and define it as a lie.

I read this argument today, by Bayta Ungar-Sargon.

If you say that the left says things that they do not say, you're not owning them. You're just making shit up.

So if the first is true, and "the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to", what is it?

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

I mean that the Constitution IS a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to. That's pretty much the point of all these books. Ungar-Sargon is saying that anti-racists don't believe that, but they totally do.

EDIT: I personally don't feel the phrase "failed to live up to" is fair.

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What’s the tl;dr version of what bi 3 posted? I’m part of the problem if my actions don’t speak louder than my words?

spike wrote:What’s the tl;dr version of what bi 3 posted? I’m part of the problem if my actions don’t speak louder than my words?

He highlighted 6 paragraphs for you, Spike.

BurtReynolds wrote:

Peeps wrote:

Bammer wrote:What is the catchy term for opposite of “woke”?

Slope? Slept?

republican or conservative

Definitely not.

To add to the cringe-fest: grill-pilled.

Rob wrote:Why do you assume it’s a tool of repression? (The author, not you). Can’t it be a progressive document that allowed for change?

The author asserts that is the postmodern perspective on the document, which aligns with much of the CRT-derived literature (see 'Stamped' by Kendi as an example), but her piece is a vicious critique on that particular religion not an endorsement of it. If you thought she was arguing in favor of today's flavor of anti-racism, whoa dude.

Looking at the paragraph after what B quoted, you'll see this:

while history teaches 1776 as the year of our nation’s founding, we should consider whether “the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619,” s the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, put it in an introduction.

The 'defining contradictions' and the date, 1619, are the result of that postmodern perspective. The same way of thinking is evident when people claim cops 'have their roots in slave patrols' and thus cannot be reformed and must be abolished.

The real argument is that Hegel's master-slave dialectic, Marx's bourgeoisie-proletariat class war, and anti-racism concepts like Kendi's binary (there is no such thing as 'not racist', only racist and anti-racist) are all the same thing: a reduction of all existence into an oppressor/oppressed, good/evil, god/devil, and now black/white power struggle, and all this has been repackaged and sold to well-meaning white folks who were convinced they are in the Oppressor group are desperate to feel like part of the solution.

I didn’t read the books, I was quoting your post. I don’t know why people go to such extremes. Anti-woke rhetoric can be just as ridiculous and annoying.

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What’s the debate? That a significant enough percentage of people think the constitution was a tool of oppression? I’m not buying it.

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BurtReynolds wrote:

Rob wrote:What’s the debate? That a significant enough percentage of people think the constitution was a tool of oppression? I’m not buying it.

A significant percentage of very powerful people want to normalize these ideas in the public and they want to institute the "solutions" in our institutions (regardless of whether the people are convinced or not). If the ideology is flawed (or worse), then what's not concerning about that?

To me it's more about how we want the next generations to think about the world. From this perspective, asserting the Constitution is racist is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is a blending of Postmodernism, Critical Theory and Social Justice, and the resulting monster's codification into education. This monster turns objective understanding into subjective understanding and allows multiple conflicting "truths" to occur in analysis. Lindsay explains here:

Language is seen as the constructor of reality. Prior to postmodernism, and for most people even now, language was seen as straightforwardly connected to objects and actions in the world. The word “dog” refers to a species of canine. Once you have learned that word, you can use it to identify something as a dog, and you can do so correctly or incorrectly. Not so in postmodern thought. Derrida describes how he rejected this idea and said that language refers only to itself using a system of differences (see also, differance). A dog is not so much recognized as indicating the animal that is a dog as it is recognized by not being a wolf or a cat. The word “dog” takes its place in a framework of interrelated terms that we use to differentiate things from each other in a way that, if not entirely arbitrary, is uncertain and imperfect. Therefore, meaning is always constructed from differences and is also never fully arrived at. It is approximated. Discourse, to Derrida, is how we do this. Discourse is the web of terms we learn and choose from to describe things (imperfectly), and Derrida believed power is baked into that web, with terms gaining most of their (relational) meaning in hierarchical binary pairs, where one term is seen as better or more default than the other (see also, phallogocentrism).

So the series of symbols d-o-g has no objective meaning, only contextual meaning that is bound by cultural power. This how highly intelligent people can say things like "2+2=5", and be correct, because the meanings of "2", "+", "=", and "5" are all culturally subjective and simply stating "2+2=5" does not specify that crucial element of cultural context. It is true that those symbols, such as "+", mean different things in different cultures and in different contexts.

As an academic exercise this isnt particularly crazy, but when applied outside of the classroom it's practical effects are disastrous. How do we build a bridge if we view language this way? For example, how do I communicate that I need 5000 tons of steel to make the first span? What is 5000 tons? What is steel? What is a span? Do I need to change the definitions of these terms to be relevant to the culture of the person I am speaking to at that moment versus the one I will speak to next? What about the next moment with the same? What the fuck is a moment? And so on.

When you mix Social Justice with Postmodernism, the shit hits the fan. Because we not only need to be aware that everything has no objective meaning, only contextually subjective meaning defined on a hierarchical binary, we introduce the concept of oppression into that binary. So by saying that "2+2=5" is false because "2+2=4", we are asserting our dominate cultural norm (Base 10 Arabic numbering which is the Euro-centric norm) at the expense of other, less powerful culture norms. This act of assertion of the dominant is thus an act of oppression against that other culture (i.e. white supremacy), invoking the oppressor/oppressed binary. Once that binary is in play, as it is in Critical Race Theory, it becomes impossible to maintain a cultural polyglot like the US because everything from a sentence in a kids book, to scores on standardized tests, to the Constitution becomes a competition of interpretations based on which interpretation assumes which role in the binary and thus has "power" in for that point and of that piece of the ever evolving hierarchy.

So what ideas do we want our kids to learn and carry forth as they inherit the world? 2+2=4? 2+2=5? 2+2=4 and 2+2=5? X X X X X? Or do we maybe accept a bit of oppression and go with the perspective that allowed us to land on the fucking moon?

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BurtReynolds wrote:Time for another round of "Was this made by SJWs or Klansmen?"

How dare they possess such traits!

I think the argument here would be that people who are not white men also possess these traits, among others, but don’t seem to benefit as easily. One argument that holds true in real life is this one, almost exclusively preached by white guys. That said, that presentation looks ridiculous. Reminds me that the smart people in charge aren’t actually much smarter than the rest of us.

Rob wrote:I think the argument here would be that people who are not white men also possess these traits, among others, but don’t seem to benefit as easily. One argument that holds true in real life is this one, almost exclusively preached by white guys. That said, that presentation looks ridiculous. Reminds me that the smart people in charge aren’t actually much smarter than the rest of us.

Source:

https://wmfdp.com/whitepapers/the-roots ... boardroom/

It reads like it was written by a white supremacist

Bi_3 wrote:

Rob wrote:I think the argument here would be that people who are not white men also possess these traits, among others, but don’t seem to benefit as easily. One argument that holds true in real life is this one, almost exclusively preached by white guys. That said, that presentation looks ridiculous. Reminds me that the smart people in charge aren’t actually much smarter than the rest of us.

Source:

https://wmfdp.com/whitepapers/the-roots ... boardroom/

It reads like it was written by a white supremacist

Oh man. Lol. Wow.

On a scale of 1-10 with 5 being the same, 1 being worse, and 10 being better...

Where are we at today as a country one year after (into) the response to George Floyd?

Bammer wrote:On a scale of 1-10 with 5 being the same, 1 being worse, and 10 being better...

Where are we at today as a country one year after (into) the response to George Floyd?

I read something that said less people support BLM now than a year ago. For every B there are 10 verbs who just want to run them over.