This erroneous post from CBS Mornings provides us with a great opportunity to discuss my friend Tobias's new book, 'Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy -- and What we can do about it.'

That's right ladies and gents, it's time for a thread!

https://twitter.com/CBSMornings/status/1683458045974650880

Firstly, I skimmed this curriculum and it's a pretty robust curriculum. Nowhere does it suggest that enslaved people benefitted from slavery. I would encourage you to review the entire curriculum. I even noticed, with great surprise, some books I was exposed to in my youth.

Conspiracy Theories are coping mechanisms that give people a sense of solidity in a fundamentally insecure world (by definition, hehe). They’re often both bigoted and adaptive. You cant get a person to stop believing in them unless you give them tools to deal w/insecurity. Conspiracy Theories are a form of splitting in the psychological sense of the word where you see all things over here as good and all things over there as bad. (Here and there are just categories, you can replace it with any arbitrary category.)

My tweets re: Disney really ignited a conversation & I'm grateful for that. Even if you thought it was stupid/dumb/idiotic, you still engaged so part of me is grateful for that. Thank you! Many also raised very interesting questions about the role that money plays in all this. I'd like to take a stab at discussing that. I've learned that I'm actually not one of those people who believes in banning billionaires. I think there's a way to consciously (healthily) seek profit (as opposed to unconsciously).

I've been watching this really interesting conversation between Marion Woodman and Robert Johnson about the concept of the divine feminine and divine masculine and how both are suppressed in our society today. (Thread) You can think of the divine feminine and divine masculine not as genders but as primordial, complementary energies that permeate the fabric of existence. In the Daoist system these are represented as Yin and Yang.

Disney plays a sacred role in our society. It is tasked with transmitting the values of fairy tales, both old and new, to generations. This is a holy task. Fairy tales are not trifles. They are symbolic myths, representations of the collective consciousness of our culture. I would encourage the company to ask itself what it means to take that task seriously when navigating culture wars. Disney is not a billion dollar company merely because it makes us "happy." Many of its films are about the greatest aspiration of all time: human individuation.

I skimmed the NYT editorial on free speech and I get why people are angry. For starters, the opening paragraph is simply not true. I appreciate the spirit of where it's coming from but no one has the right to be free of fear. It's actually kind of amusing since this is exactly the argument that some Critical Race Theorists in the 70s used to argue for the curtailing of free speech on behalf of minorities who, as they argued, could feel afraid when being called shameful slurs.

I haven't watched the full show w/ @jordanbpeterson & @joerogan (cause girl, too long lol) but there's a clip w/ them speaking about "blackness." I was disappointed cuz they were discussing "transcending race" & that needs a treatment thats far less superficial than what I saw. Many of our great leaders (James Baldwin, Dubois) spoke about transcending the color line. A book called 'Racecraft' explores it. But that process, on a national or global scale requires such a careful psychological undertaking that it's irresponsible to speak of it casually.

DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOT READ THE BILL.

If this bill does try to legislate feelings, its advocates are making the exact same argument that (actual) CRT advocates made about free speech laws in the 90s. They wanted to legislate away feelings of discomfort. Mimesis strikes again.

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1483861837930287106

AN UPDATE: I have read the section in question.

Reminder on this fine day that Dr. King taught that self-purification was one of the most important elements of social-justice work. If this isn't part of the work you do as a social justice advocate, you will quite literally perpetuate injustice. Self-purification is a practice. Dr. King understood that if you were protesting racist behavior you were extremely susceptible to becoming racist in response and in seeing your fellow white brother and sister as inferior. So you had to guard against that by having an awareness of your Shadow.

Real world application of the Uncertain Principle i.e. "The Observer changes the Observed"

Maya A. has this wonderful quote where she says if you tell a person over and over again they are trash they will say to you oh, really, I will show you how trashy I can be. If a person lacks self-awareness they will begin to unconsciously imitate what they are seeing // what they are being told is their reality. (This is a mimetic impulse gone wrong). Isn't that fascinating?

I hope we have the courage to take the deep wisdom and warnings in ‘Don’t Look Up’ seriously. I read reviews that said this was about climate change but I wasn't even thinking about climate change while watching it lol.

Tonight I learned that Derrick Bell's problem w/ Brown v Board was that it was implemented in the same way people try to do antiracism today: through what he calls "racial-balance remedies." Hold on to your socks this is about to be an insane and fiery tweet storm. There's a line of reasoning today that says if we have 5 white people in our company we need 5 black people in order to achieve racial equity. This is a racial balance remedy. I suspect this is the influence of Ibram Kendi's writings but that's not important for now.

This isn't quite true. In 'Silent Covenants,' Derrick Bell lays out his argument for Brown V Board being a hollow, win for African Americans that didn't actually result in a quality education. He argues that what African Americans needed was neither segregation nor integration.

https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1471561975956062211

Thomas Sowell has made the same argument. Bell called for more funding for private African-American schools and school choice aka charter schools and other private options. He argued, in other words for a conservative approach so it's ironic that there's cross fire over this.

@thomaschattwill I think identity in the sense Colin means it here is a product of Rousseau, who believed in a "just be your true self" vision of the self, and who believed that Man is born perfect and corrupted by society. Socrates and Aristotle had completely different conceptions of the self. @thomaschattwill This way of thinking is also low key a product of Gnosticism, and you can see both Gnosticism and Rousseaun thought in films like the Matrix, where the belief is that society is just one big form of oppression stopping people from being awake to their true selves.

The Matrix predicted the meta verse. I’m re-watching the first one now and I didn’t realize how disembodied it was. It’s very Cartesian which is ironic because it means it’s still in the matrix 😂

So last week I was fishing for something to prove Ibram Kendi wrong about something he wrote (I have an us-vs-them relationship with with Kendi, its a problem and I'm working on it) and along the way I discovered something very interesting about Derrick Bell. Derrick Bell is an architect of CRT. He wrote a book called 'Silent Covenants' where he writes how Brown v. Board of Education was a symbolic win but a failure because courts overemphasized correcting for the "separate" part in "separate but equal" clause of Plessy V. Ferguson

This is Gnosticism, parts of which are meaningful and enriching, parts of which are ontologically problematic. The Gnostic idea of the two-world mythology (see ‘The Matrix’) is what’s being advanced here. Let’s get into it. 😏

https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1464376696640053256

The problem with the two-worlds mythology is that it creates a psychological split, one in which there is the true world and the fallen world, each of which is ruled by two different gods: a Demi state and a higher state.

Thread: I’m almost finished Racecraft by Barbara and Karen Fields. It is deeply compelling and has helped me see how the myth of race continues apace; yet as the authors argue, believing in race is a rational thing that helps people make sense of the world. The one major flaw I find (or maybe it is not a flaw but something worth wrestling with) is the point they make about race as an invisible ontology. Invisible ontologies will always be with us for as long as man is because man will always be compelled to ask of his life, ‘Why?’

Our nation’s collective unconscious is wrecked. We perceive each other as algebraic formulas, as bit characters playing manufactured roles instead of human beings beset by insecurities, fears & anxieties, — all shadows we’re feverishly projecting on to each other.

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1460761513023598595

White supremacists do this; the nation of islam does this, one an inverted tenet of the other. The notion of “white tears” and “white devils” is within striking distance of the notion of the “white nation” and “white pride.”

Thread: Some who believe that the national election was stolen will celebrate jubilantly if Rittenhouse is acquitted. For them, the American system is corrupt except for when the system upholds the same conclusions they come to. Others, who believe the election *was* free and fair will lament the inherent “whiteness” — which here means “corruptibility” — of the courts if Rittenhouse is acquitted. Some have already started complaining about “white tears”; others may threaten to riot and actually do so.

This tweet is revealing. Ibram Kendi and the anti-woke are now officially in a mimetic competition w/ each other. Both act the same way, & fundamentally believe the same things but in different dimensions: that persecution of their tribe is everywhere and must be sniffed out.

https://twitter.com/DrIbram/status/1453766229618040843

For the anti-woke in Texas, (and Chris Rufo has been instrumental in this), any mention of racism, let alone CRT is now suspect simply because any mention of racism could "make students feel discomfort." This is not a rebuttal to CRT; it is literally a product of CRT.