This fallacy should be given a name.

I will show why it is a fallacious argument by way of analogy.
It is a highly complex matter to sort out John Locke’s political arguments, especially in dialogue with Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, etc. It is graduate level work.

BUT — it is not hard to teach children that democracy is good and all men are created equal and have equal rights.
That is to say, one *can* (and we have traditionally done) teach children the PRINCIPLES and CONSEQUENCES of a broadly Lockean theory of political right. That is basically Americanism.

It's not necessary to teach the most difficult Lockean arguments re: representative democracy.
Of course, I don’t need to go there for my analogy.

I was taught physics in high school. But physics requires very advanced study, well beyond high school level!

Yes, but you can teach “high school physics.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideas about race and morality derive from Ghandi, Thoreau and Plato’s Socrates as well as the Christian moral tradition.

You don’t NEED to work through all of that to teach “don’t judge people by their skin color, but by their character” as a PRINCIPLE.
The study of what GROUNDS “do not judge men by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” matters only when the PRINCIPLE is questioned or rejected.

“Why should I do that?” someone may ask.

The fully educated person can ANSWER that question.

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More from @EveKeneinan

26 Jun
Lewis Gordon holds that only “ONE race exists, and that race is ‘Negro’.”

I’m going to explain why Gordon’s conclusion is a non sequitur, and in the process explain why one can’t correlate ANCESTRY with RACE.
Gordon is right that the study of human genome shows all humans originated in Africa.

“From a genetic point of view, there is indeed one human species that originated in a single region.”

So how does he get that these ancestral humans were NEGROS?
Because they were from Africa, of course.

Everyone knows that Negros come from Africa.

Africa has a special Negro-making property.
Read 12 tweets
24 Jun
When I say “race isn’t real” what I mean is this: If an alien biologist came to earth, knowing nothing of humans, and set out to learn about our biological and genetic make up, it would not discover “races.” There is no natural fact of the matter that human beings are so divided.
An alien anthropologist who studied our history and customs would discover that we have, in recent centuries, taken to dividing ourselves up in such social categories, but he would also be aware that this habit of ours has no foundation in nature.
After all, whether there are “races” is an empirical question, and one that has been answered: No, there aren’t.

We thought for millennia that Euclid’s Parallel Postulate was really a Theorem, until it was finally proven not to be a Theorem. It’s a Postulate.
Read 5 tweets
20 Jun
👀 ImageImageImageImage
So, I had a look at this. PinkNews, needless to say, wildly misrepresents the study.
There are two areas where GUESSES people make correlate with their biases.

The guesses are ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE just from the political bias which is known.

The study does not, as it should have, distinguish between correct guesses and knowledge.
Read 14 tweets
19 Jun
Just had a dispiriting conversation (sort of) with a friend who, I learn, has a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I cannot fathom how otherwise linguistically competent people can impute such insane and malicious meanings to Trump’s otherwise reasonably plain words.
There is something opposite to the Principle of Charity at play here—call it the Principle of Malice: when it is Trump, his words are *always* to be taken in the worst possible light, no matter how *wildly implausible*, no matter how much language must be tortured to get there.
My friend is (apparently) absolutely convinced that Trump told people to INJECT DISINFECTANT to cure COVID.
Read 8 tweets
19 Jun
I had a dream.
Some men had constructed the world’s most difficult obstacle course.
Mighty Achilaos was to attempt to beat the course, at the festival.
Read 7 tweets
19 Jun
Let’s talk about this bit of dishonesty from Dr. Jillian Ford of Kennesaw State University. ImageImage
She says

1 Critical Race Theory says that racism is an everyday occurrence for people of color
2 Critical Race Theory does not say that white people are inherently oppressive
3 Critical Race Theory is “not about individual behavior” but “about systems and policies”
Contra 1: This is an EQUIVOCATION designed to hide what CRT teaches. CRT doesn’t say that racism is an “everyday occurrence” AS PER individual experience, but that racism is EVERYWHERE AT ALL TIMES. You know, in the SYSTEMS and POLICIES.
Read 13 tweets

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