When I used to tutor kids at chess, I would humanize the pieces by describing when they would be happy or sad. So let's do a thread of a few 1/
Pawns want to be queens. They love holding hands with other pawns and hate having pawns in front of them. 2/
Bishops love open diagonals. They hate having their view blocked by pawns. 3/
Knights love safe squares in the middle of the board that can't be attacked by pawns. They hate being stuck on the edge of the board. 4/
Rooks love looking clear into the other side of the board. They also love seeing their twin. They hate being bored. 5/
Queens love menacing kings. They love having help from other pieces in doing so. They hate being threatened. 6/
Kings are terrified of enemy queens. They love having their guards when the enemy queen is on the board. When the queens are gone, he wants to help a pawn become a queen. He loves being married. 7/
Chess is a team sport. Your pieces need to work together towards a shared mission. You want everyone safe yet active. 8/
There are exceptions of course, but a lot of chess is general principles. It's often just applying them consistently and safely
If people like chess tips, I'll add more going forward. At my peak I was in the top 6k players on chess.com (out of 12.7 million players)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Andrew Sullivan knows that his racial hereditarian views are public. There's little value in him pretending the rest of us can't read.
The number of Andrew Sullivan's claims about "race differences" are legion. Everyone knows he's a member of the caliper crew, and that's not the only head measurement he's famous for.
Hey @sullydish, do we need to keep going about demonstrating your racial hereditarian views, or do you want to keep thinking we can't read?
Racist stereotypes are much easier to reinforce in a person's mind than they are to refute.
Most of the evidence for this claim is from John Ogbu who studied a couple cities in the early 2000s and generalized. So here's another city, more recently.
Other researchers have investigated the claim that smart black kids are ostracized for being smart. It's been bunk for years.
I post this because a lot of people liked the initial tweet, seeing it as a cute platitude.
No. It's telling you that "race" cannot "explain" any outcome. The politics of a society is what explains those outcomes.
No child does anything "because they are black", because no child "is black". That doesn't deny that society labels that child as black and acts upon that racialization. It doesn't even deny that the child reacts in response.
Rorschach Tweet - tweets containing enough social cues to be read 100% accurately by groups A and B, with both groups having violently conflicting reads.
A Rorschach Tweet example.
X: "fjlsuk adrhl chdet jdtyuf."
Group A: "Yeah, dogs are totally cute!"
Group B: "This monster wants to kill cats!"
I have felt frustrated seeing tweets that make sense to me, and others also think it reasonable.
Then, I see others without those cues who have reads that I think are ridiculous. But are their reads really invalid?
I have zero moral high ground on this. I've been on both sides.
One of the challenges of "criticizing your own side" when they go against your stated principles is it invites others to jump in and attempt to discredit the entire set of principles.
My own principles require that I speak out when my friends violate those principles. I ask and hope for the same from those on "the other side". Your principles should come first and foremost.
So, let's create positive space for that.
I should be able to address people who are fighting racism when they do so in a way I don't think is healthy, without having people seeing it as an opportunity to attack the entire anti-racism project itself.
People really think "why isn't transracialism okay?" is a gotcha in their argument for race as a biological reality, but all they do is display their misunderstanding of social constructs.
Also, people have quite often chosen their "race". So-called passing is a useful tradition in American history, where people who were black legally (!) said they were white to get access to certain things. As long as they were believed, they were white.