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Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 Profile picture
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9 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
It’s a really complicated ethical dilemma, but ultimately I’m afraid Trump has been made into a digital martyr for free speech and this will produce many, many negative consequences going forward.
What is a lot less complicated is that we should all be very concerned about a few tech oligarchs having such extraordinary power over our ability to communicate with each other. To paraphrase Hitchens: we are fashioning all kinds of rods for own backs.
To be clear: if what Trump did and inspired was so bad, which I believe it absolutely was, he should face political and legal consequences. Tech oligarchs should not be the arbiters of right and wrong in our public sphere.
I should say they should not be the *whimsical* arbiters. What are the actual principles? They had Erdogan arguably inciting violence in France two months ago with zero consequences. If they are arbiters of right and wrong, Trump should have been banned years ago.

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More from @thomaschattwill

Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 Profile picture
27 Dec 20
I’m so thankful my black father who escaped real segregation through the magic of books suggested I read James Baldwin and Earnest Gaines and Shakespeare and Maupassant and Maimonides and Aesop’s fables and never would have thought to segregate the world of literature like this.
*Ernest
There was never “white” literature in my house, or “black” literature, for that matter, there were books that mattered and books you needed to deal with, and there were subjects of interest and subjects of necessity. Mostly there was a sense of books being transcendent.
Read 4 tweets
Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 Profile picture
18 Dec 20
capitalism gets thrown around like an epithet these days. my brother didn't go to college, didn't have any family money, didn't have any social capital and comes from a historically oppressed group. still, he had an idea, started a business and sold it to a much larger company 1/
he's not larry page with it. he still needs to find new ideas, as he's only in his 40s. but in the space of about two years he was able to *transform* his life. he literally made something out of nothing. this is possible in the US. i don't think this could ever happen in france.
he was employing business school grads with MBAs. providing jobs.
Read 4 tweets
Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 Profile picture
29 Nov 20
Is there anyone working on a kind of sociology of knowledge of wokeness?
For those asking: I simply mean an analysis or genealogy of the relationship between the constellation of ideas gathered under the umbrella of “wokeness”/“successor ideology” and the social contexts in which they’ve arisen. I don’t mean an argument for it against them.
Ask and you shall receive. This is getting at what I meant:

“Cancel culture is the product of this transposition of moral rhetoric from class conflict to cultural conflicts around ethnicity and race.”

americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/libera…
Read 5 tweets
Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 Profile picture
28 Nov 20
Kendi makes sense when he says “Black people don’t exist biologically or behaviorally.” But then he admits they do exist “culturally.” And he loses me when he rejects the legitimacy of making any cultural comparisons at all since they imply hierarchy. 1/
@ 29:00:
Any researcher who asks about cultural deficiencies “must create a cultural standard to answer that question. And once that cultural standard is created, cultural hierarchy is created. And once that culture hierarchy is created, culturally racist ideas are created.” 2/
So the argument is that any cultural critiques are inherently illegitimate or even racist. Each cultire is as good or bad as the next.

This argument is not new but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it gain such unquestioning mainstream and elite traction.

Americans are in trouble.
Read 4 tweets
Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 Profile picture
4 Nov 20
Trump doubled his black female support from 2016.
I need to read the human stories behind this. We have to produce quality writing and insight here.
madamenoire.com/1199243/more-b…
Read 5 tweets
Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 Profile picture
1 Nov 20
Full-on blitz of victim blaming towards France in the US media these days.

And yet, I’m old enough to remember on the day after 9/11, Le Monde writing “We Are All Americans.”
Another one:
It’s not Trump alone letting down the transatlantic alliance.
Read 6 tweets

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