“Nobody serious thinks this, but a bunch of readers are hungry to believe it, so can we find someone shameless enough to make a case that will sound superficially respectable to people who don’t know any better?” Click goldmine.
Call me quaint, but on topics where a normal reader can’t easily evaluate the seriousness of an argument, I think running pieces like this is an abrogation of editorial duty. It’s like running flat-eartherism or “sovereign citizen” nonsense.
You’re signalling, “this is one among several credible positions, where there’s reasonable disagreement among specialists.” Which is a lie. You’re running it because it will get clicks, and MORE clicks because other respectable outlets are unwilling to lie to their readers.
And then you can plead “Oh, but it’s the OPINION section. That’s where we have no duty to the reader and can run whatever meretricious garbage will yield the most traffic, you see.”

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More from @normative

6 Jul
This got about a thousand times creepier when I hit the bio and realized the author was a college professor.
This is an inadvertently perfect reductio ad absurdum of demands for “political neutrality” (whether from social media platforms or other institutions). Because obviously there are tons of odious political views nearly everyone thinks OUGHT to be romantic dealbreaker.
I assume that if the students also said they weren’t interested in dating ISIS fighters, anti-Semites, or admirers of Joseph Stalin, the author wouldn’t think that was “discriminatory” (let alone “authoritarian”)—he’d be worried if those things WEREN’T dealbreakers.
Read 5 tweets
1 Jul
Cosign: Excellent piece. The key point is that the disturbing rise of bonkers conspiracy movements has to be understood more as a failure of trust than of rationality.
We might say “I’m a rational person; I form views based on science…” But usually you didn’t DO the science. You trust the social credentialing systems that validate the people who assure us they did the science.
Yeah, one reason this flourishes is that given the sheer quantity of news and scientific pronouncements, it’s trivial to come up with lots of examples of Approved Sources getting things wrong (or even just seemingly wrong).
Read 5 tweets
1 Jul
It’s been clear for a long while that a big part of why our conversations around race are so broken is that folks on left & right have very different ideas of what “racism” means. yahoo.com/news/poll-the-…
We still see versions of this exchange constantly:

“Racism is embedded in American culture and institutions.”

“Why are you calling me, personally, a racist?"
Mostly the problem here is that many on the right stridently refuse to think in any terms other than individual hatred. Though I also wish folks on the left would stop insisting on pushing claims that defy ordinary usage in ways that end up sounding ridiculous.
Read 4 tweets
25 Jun
I find myself increasingly frustrated with all sides of this conversation. The right wing media has made a crude caricature of a varied body of academic work their flavor-of-the-week boogieman, while the pushback is veering toward “CRT? Never heard of it. Does it even exist?"
Simultaneously true:
(A) The CRT backlash is badly confused about what CRT is, and often in bad faith.
(B) There really does exist a line of CRT, influential in some ed departments & teacher trainings, that views pedagogy as a locus of activism for racial equity.
That second part, however distorted the noise machine’s picture of it, is not a conspiracy theory or made up. There are books and conferences and everything. Pre-backlash nobody would have seriously denied this part.
Read 12 tweets
14 Jun
I think CRT is a mixed bag, some of which is insightful, some of which is off base; it doesn’t seem particularly illuminating to reduce the whole bundle to “the crudest elements of Ibram Kendi’s worldview.” And I think Cooke is pulling the same bait & switch he diagnoses.
To wit: Nobody’s banning teaching about racism! The sudden popular relevance of a recherché academic theory is purely about sparing little Jaden a daily Maoist struggle session! But then you look at the Florida statute, and gosh it seems broader than that.
Instruction, Florida stipulates, may not include "the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
Read 12 tweets
13 Jun
Ok, but the trouble is (as the campaigns against it acknowledge) no pre-collegiate schools are explicitly teaching “Critical Race Theory.” So you get a hunt for supposedly suspicious phrases like “systemic racism” or “white supremacy.”
One guide for parents, which warns that “they are trying to culturally replace you,” suggests watching out for any of these pernicious CRT buzzwords, many of which would be involved in any serious discussion of race in American history. americarenewing.com/issues/list-cr…
The pop definitions of CRT I see lately tend to involve a list of supposed “tenets” that invariably include obviously pernicious claims almost nobody would endorse and what ought at this point to be rather banal truisms.
Read 6 tweets

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