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Wesley Yang Profile picture
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20 Jun, 4 tweets, 1 min read
When a politician gets piled on for saying something fine that nonetheless violates a media class taboo, it tends to redound to their favor
It takes a certain fortitude to lean into those moments, or at least not to flinch and withdraw
Disagreeable personalities that thrive on breaking consensus in this way are correlated with other personality defects; what is needed is someone of both sterling character and high disagreeability
*Are often correlated

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More from @wesyang

Wesley Yang Profile picture
21 Jun
The need to justify continued existence, funding, sinecures for a certain class of university graduate -- and the willingness of deep pocketed donors to fund it -- is one of the primary drivers of the ongoing ideological freakout
Discrete movements for rights and recognition obtain their goals and then flow into the broader stream of a “successor ideology” that posits a unity-of-all-oppression narrative that responds to the need to keep the activist class busy with new crusades
When there is no more water to be squeezed from the stone, you have to manufacture new categories of the oppressed, manufacture new categories of grievance, and eventually cannibalize the very values of fairness and tolerance that you once set off to create
Read 6 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
19 Jun
Listened to an hour of NPR in the car while driving yesterday. 70 percent of what I heard was about race, including their TV critic who wrote the “Tom Hanks must become anti-racist” column declaring that In the Heights was colorist in its casting.
Another segment was about a black female scholar who turned her research into woman-led slave revolts into a graphic novel. They teased the next day's segment, an author of a book on how to be a better white ally.

The segments were fine, but in aggregate it felt a little much
Basically, this comment by a Times staffer has become the actual guiding principle of NPR coverage
Read 8 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
18 Jun
We have always taught fourth graders to map their identities along a continuum of power and privilege. That's just common sense.
What's the alternative? Easy: there is a single standard of respect owed to everyone by everyone. Yes, there is a history of racist abuses that accounts for disparities and a debt owed to those on the wrong side of them that all should learn.
No, a heavily politicized and administered society with an apparatus of surveillance and discipline imposed on everyday life will not close those disparities or hasten reconciliation or progress
Read 4 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
18 Jun
The Byzantines saw dark skin as virile, pale skin as feminine. That's hardly "anti-blackness", and of course none of it has anything to do with today's police.

But at least the author wants to get beyond "Europeans invented all evil in the 17th century" washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/0… Image
"Deep legacy of anti-blackness..." but then..."it was associated with the admirable strength of ancient heroes".

OK, so...not really anti-black... Image
There used to be more sophistication in the way an academic would try to pander to contemporary interests, at least a token effort to preserve the integrity of one's discipline, not just blasting out cringe anachronism
Read 5 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
17 Jun
You don't have to have much practical experience or domain specific knowledge to know that certain categories of political proposal are inherently unrealizable on their face, and you have to be deeply immersed in a world of fantasy to think otherwise
What we've learned since mid-2020 is how large a share of the American chattering classes have zero practical experience and are deeply immersed in a world of fantasy
"This institution offends my sense of justice based on six viral news events, therefore it can be...abolished!" is a thought one can only conceive of after a lifetime of systemic miseducation
Read 5 tweets
Wesley Yang Profile picture
16 Jun
She excoriates the hateful thing and the people who are its vectors. In passing, she reminds us of a truth that is everywhere being suppressed by power-seeking connivers chimamanda.com
She responds here as a human being free to respond as a human being responds
The question that is not asked here but that others may ask on her behalf: “What was my own role in creating the constituency that turned on me and whom I have learned to deplore?”

From a 2018 New Yorker profile of her:
Read 4 tweets

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