From the LA Times op-ed page today:
...were overwhelmingly white and male...
Can you guess what the subject was? Huh? Can you?
Of course not. This phrase is used constantly for a nearly endless number of subjects. It could be anything.
So how about if we knock it off? If you're talking about, say, a KKK resurgence, it's fine because it's relevant. If you're talking about almost anything else, it's not. It's just a bit of cheap racial and sexual ridicule tossed in to get your liberal audience nodding along. Let's give it a rest.
Well, that piece is about transhumanism. I am fairly sure that nobody, but nobody, says anything sensible about transhumanism. That's because it isn't science, it's belief. On all fronts.
There will never be any relief from this either. We can imagine computers/robots telling us, "But I AM a real girl! I am Jean!" (or John, or Yun Fat, or Baskar, or whomever). Would we believe them? It's still a matter of faith, of belief.
There's not much empiricism here at all.
Transhumanism is a reasonable extrapolation of known facts.
And quantum mechanics is an entirely unreasonable extrapolation of facts known in 1890.
It just happens to fit all the experimental data much better than any other reasonable extrapolation.
It may be belief (I'm not much interested in it) but historically "supernatural belief" skews female, whether it's fairies, astrology, or churched religion.
So there's something interesting in a belief that's *unfounded* (as you claim) that primarily attracts males...
If I say that Nobel winners are overwhelmingly white and male, I am not sure that liberals will be cheerfully nodding along. The truth is what it is except for Trump, in whose case the truth is what he can get away with it. And Trump is overwhelmingly (in the sense that he overwhelms our sense of exasperation) white and male.
There doesn't seem to be any purpose to her including that bit of detail in her story. She should either have made a point out of it or left it out of the piece. But, she's probably got a word count to hit, right?
Of course, you don’t have to be a white male to engage in bigotry and racism:
The Times reviewed the recording and reported that Martinez allegedly referred to Bonin's son who is Black as "ese changuito," which translates from Spanish to English as "that little monkey."
The Times also reported that (LA City Council President) Martinez appeared to also discuss Bonin's child's behavior during a parade. The parade as referenced appears to have occurred around 2017. She allegedly said on the call, "[t]hey're raising him like a little white kid. I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner and then I'll bring him back."
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/nury-martinez-issues-apology-following-leaked-audio-alleged-to-contain-racially-charged-comments/
If it's relevant to the story on a factual basis, I'm OK with it.
But in general, I think this whole "white people bad" thing is backfiring and is too hard to explain to my elementary school kids when they aren't supposed to say bad things about other people even when relevant.
It is what it is, but that doesn't mean we have to like it.
Maybe just not talk about race at all unless it really is relevant?
"Maybe just not talk about race at all unless it really is relevant?"
I literally did an LOL.
Your comment is, of course, entirely reasonable;
but that's what makes it so out of place in modern "discourse."
The anti-racist movement is pretty much all about centering race in every single damn aspect of our lives in order to mandate "equitable" outcomes. And this is, as far as I know, pretty much the ruling paradigm among Left Leaning universities, newsrooms, publishing houses, and studios.
Not to get too off-track, but this is the sort of "race-consciousness" that apparently led the creators of the Rings of Power streaming show (on Amazon) to make every different civilization in their version of Middle Earth resemble the demographics of Queens, NY.
On the Left these days (though not at all among your average Liberals) race is everything. There is no subject where it isn't "relevant." There is no time or place where race shouldn't be the focus of everyone's attention.
Oh look, this movement is trying to take over medical practice as well: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2837428/
"Although abuses of race-conscious research (such as early eugenics research) have been noted, in truth, both race consciousness and colorblindness can be deployed in ways that contribute to inequities. Only colorblindness, however, precludes explicit examination of racism's potential contributions to inequities. Race consciousness is essential for understanding racialized constructs and mechanisms."
In other words, just forget about the color-blindness promoted by the likes of MLK Junior. Let's focus on the color of everyone's skin instead of the content of their character.
And, yeah, just as you say, I have no doubt it's backfiring. I consider myself a Liberal, but I've never been more alienated from the Left in my life. Their tunnel-vision and narrow-minded obsessiveness (at least when it comes to race) is a wonder to behold. And if that's how I feel, then how on earth are so-called "conservatives" reacting?
a white male doesn’t like talking about race because it makes him feel bad.
a bird lands on my windowsill.
It is, or would be, relevant far more often than it should be. Just as, today, language communicates more by the connotations of words than by their denotations (and very often, in isolation from either, by the affect of the speaker), there are many fields of inquiry whose discourse -- both internal and external -- is fundamentally conditioned by sociological affinities. This should not be so, but there it is. Times it was not so; better times? Whether or no, there is no way back, least of all by pretending.
Social media has, in the blink of an eye, destroyed the paradigms of curation of the public discourse that had been in place since Gutenberg. No one knows how to navigate the new landscape, which, seen with the old eyes, is entirely featureless. Everyone is grasping at straws. More straws, say I; give me all the straws. I will separate signal from noise. Your mileage may vary.
The point actually seems pretty clear in context: that it is notable that the people who gravitate toward a philosophy where particular minds (and maybe bodies) are superior and possibly even perfectible just so happen to have a strong degree of overlap with the sociological groups with the most privilege. And that by itself should probably make us skeptical of the central belief they espouse - that if their version of transhumanism were really anywhere in the ballpark of being correct, it probably would not only have adherents among the people with the luxury to create their own journals for their self-serving theories.
What I quickly skimmed of the essay didn't seem like a very good piece of writing, but it's not unreasonable to point out "uh, of course extropism only appeals to wealthy white guys in the first place because it fits hand-in-glove with those guys' fantasy that their place in society stems not from the institutionalization of their privilege over centuries, but rather their innate superiority as a tribe of ubermentschen."
Quick addition - I think also that detail is thrown in to show the author's eventual awareness of her own naivete: as a young person, she was sincerely intrigued by the ideas of extropism on their own terms, but at the time, she didn't realize that that meant she was one of the marks: that the leaders of the extropian movement weren't really all that intellectually honest - their motives were not, like she had assumed, really entirely about creating an abstract perfected human, but rather about rationalizing their belief that only they, members of the overclass, were superior humans in the first place. The uniformity of those leaders of the movement, and the specific groups they were all drawn from, should have been a clue that something might be amiss, but she hadn't recognized it at the time.
“tossed in to get *your liberal audience* nodding along”
*Which is overwhelmingly white and male.
Context is key. And if there is any nuance to that context, that is something this country DOES NOT do.
I don't see the problem.
If you were reading an article about an obscure religion, would you want to know some basic demographic information about followers?
Extropians are not quite a religion, but it is something close. So what's wrong with this?
OH - a white guy doesn't like it. I see - "National Geographic is for gawking at the Other. Why's there a white guy on the cover?"
(I personally am overwhelmingly white and male, just for reference.)
Good point.
That person is a whacko. 😂
The rest of the piece is pretty bad as well. Comparing transhumanists to eugenicists, a bunch of nonsense about how the "spark of human consciousness can't be uploaded", and so forth. One you've read more than one of these pieces arguing that you shouldn't engage in big-scale thinking about the future because "didn't ya know, there are current day crisises!", you've pretty much read them all.
So the phrase was used in that the people who set ideals the author followed were white and make. But the author was quite different and so perhaps the author needed to look for more personally relevant ideals. Seems perfectly reasonable and factually accurate (I dabble in transhumanism).
Maybe if it annoyed you, you should take a look in a mirror.
Whatever. It's a dumb piece of writing, but I think we should get used to it.
Truth is, most of pop culture and history and politics and social life etc etc was overwhelmingly white and male from the 1920s (at least) until 2017 or so, so it's kind of meaningless to point it out.
But, apropos of nothing, the other day I watched the 80s movie "Real Genius" (don't ask me why I watched it...) and I was struck by a) how lame it was and b) how utterly white and male it was in its attitudes (college exists to launch white men into the world, and to give them access to hot babes, basically...)
You totally missed the point of this (woman-directed) movie!
Chris Knight isn't chasing hot babes because that's what college is for, he's rebelling against institutions that are humorless, conformist, and fake. His sensibility is childish, but what do you expect from a 21-year-old?
The character isn't perfect, and certainly has some growing up to do, but the whole point is that every authority figure in the movie is way worse: they are counting on Caltech to raise geniuses to help them develop technologies whose purpose is to kill people, and they also are counting on Caltech's institutional blind spots to help them achieve this. The school is obsessed with the idea of merit but devotes no energy to the humanities that might consider the question of whether it should be pursuing the specific technological projects it's researching.
I know this is a not-enirely-relevant response to your point, but Chris Knight is not the main character of the movie.
Ok, more to the point: I would argue that the filmmakers seem to think "non-conformity" from studying and learning should include access to babes in bikinis.
This is such a ridiculous interpretation of the pool party scene: https://youtu.be/7l6VsyoVx2Y
You can tell that Mitch isn't even that psyched about getting dragged to Chris's pool party. Besides the obvious (that he's 15, and he's too young/awkward to feel comfortable around a bunch of 20somethings drinking and partying), he's clearly more interested in having a meaningful conversation with Jordan and nerding out with her, and the film is very obvious in how it casts this preference in a favorable light.
If the film actually took the position that access to hawt chicks in bikinis were central to its ethos, you would expect to see a lot more of them, but even in the one pool party scene where they show up they're mostly just kind of in the background! The focus of the scene is on Mitch's feelings of being a fish out of water rather than on glorifying Chris's wild-and-crazy, overcompensating style.
I think we just disagree. I think you're right that the movie presents the Val Kilmer character as an anti-establishment role model for Mitch to emulate. However, I think it's pretty clear part of his fun-loving devil-may-care attitude is "fun means pool parties with bikini babes". I get it that you don't agree.
Um, that's not really what the film does. The film is more subtle than you're giving it credit for.
The entire arc of Mitch's character is that this precocious kid is coming of age in an institution that is totally new to him. In the early parts of the film, Chris is the only game in town if someone needs a role model to emulate that's not entirely on the side of the heartless university.
But Mitch realizes almost immediately that Chris is a friend and someone who's on his side, but he's not an idol: that there is something kind of forced, immature, and a little sad about his rejection of literally everything he sees as "serious" and adult, and that his brashness and irreverence are more subconscious defense mechanisms than they are conducive to emotional health.
By the end of the film, it starts to feel like even Chris is starting to have an inkling that he needs to eventually grow up - that if even someone as damaged as Lazlo can eventually make it out in the real world, that there must be some path for him to follow that isn't only the double-sided coin of nihilism and hedonism.
_Real Genius_ is one of my favorites. No need for me to ask why you watched it. 😉 I like _Clueless_ too.
Thanks for that, Kevin. There's a pervasive laziness in some mainstream pundits that attribute everything lazily to racism when there are many different species and genera of evil/stupidity. the January 6 insurrectionists were "overwhelmingly white and male," except there were a great number of white females there -- just look at the list of indicted rioters, and a non-zero number of Black participants as well -- small, yes, but why not zero? Note that one of the ringleaders, Ali Alexander, is Black. And getting back to females, who are the most strikingly abhorrent of Trump's political supporters? Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Laura Ingraham, Sidney Powell, and many more. It seems to me that Trump World goes out of its way to recruit and elevate non-white-male personalities specifically as a way of trolling the libs. There's also the disturbing trend of Trump support among Hispanic male voters, which is often waved away by saying the word "economy," as if that explains everything. The Trump problem is much deeper and more insidious than just plain old white male dumbness.
Wha... what blog am I on? What's happening...?
Kevin is a Cisgender, Heteronormal, Agent of the Patriarchy (CHAP). As such, we can dismiss his rants about the use of "overwhelmingly white and male", because CHAPs hate to be outed as toxic for the planet, which they've been for centuries. Especially CHAPs of European heritage. They are the worst.
good parody of the Left !
Except that, these days, I honest-to-God can't be certain if you intend your post to be a parody or not 😐
The people who have a problem with including this phrase are overwhelmingly white and male.
@todwest
Race-baiter.
And does that make our opinion less valid?
Sorry, but it is highly relevant that any group is overwhelmingly white and male if it is making decisions affecting people who are neither.
How relevant is "highly relevant"?
And to what extent do other factors matter?
Are the ideas of the white males relevant? their character? ideals? hopes and dreams? efforts? successes and failures? religion? ideology? education? their personal history (be it good or bad)? significant life experiences? and on and on ...
does any of that matter? is it relevant?
or area we only concerned with immutable traits like "white" and "male"?
How relevant is "relevant"?
Obviously we aren't only concerned with race and gender. All the items you listed are routinely discussed in great detail. The hopes, ideals, religions, experiences, etc, etc of white men are so frequently discussed in great detail that it's hard to believe that you are discussing this in good faith.
The privileged yet permanently aggrieved white male complex is a curious sight to behold.
Now let's get back to complaining about the diversity of a TV show shall we? Lol.
"Obviously we aren't only concerned with race and gender."
That isn't obvious at all. I think that you, and a lot of other people, may be losing perspective on how the Left is presenting itself and how it's perceived by others. Keep in mind the quote from Kevin that he wrote this blog post about.
"The hopes, ideals, religions, experiences, etc, etc of white men are so frequently discussed in great detail that it's hard to believe that you are discussing this in good faith."
I didn't ask if these things are talked about. I asked if they genuinely matter to the modern Left. Those topics certainly do matter to conservatives and liberals alike. But do they actually animate the Left, are they an actual focus of intense discussion and debate? Are any of those topics seriously considered on the Left other than through the prism of race/gender?
I have already, in my post earlier in this thread, provided an example of a medical paper proposing that race-consciousness should be a central and guiding ideal of medical practice. Show me an example from the Left of anyone advocating for a particular issue without centering race, gender, or some other immutable trait in that way.
Life was much better for the Kevins and Karens of the world when it was just implied that everything was “neutral,” unless the author went out of their way to inform the reader that it wasn’t. For example, in articles taking place in the ghetto, it might need to be explicitly said that the subjects were black women, so the readers would be able to properly picture a stereotype in their minds (eg “welfare queen,” “crack whore,” etc.) as they read along.
And neutral was just assumed to be synonymous with “overwhelmingly white and male,” without it needing to be crassly said out loud. You know, like it was in all forms of media until approximately the last decade or so. If only somebody could restore the veil of contented ignorance over the eyes of the Kevins and Karens.
The op-ed was baffling to follow along. I have no idea why Kevin felt it necessary to fault it for inserting the phrase “overwhelmingly white and male” when there were easily a dozen other cryptic choices made by the author in weaving the piece together into a (barely) coherent whole. If all Kevin wanted to do was make the point that race and gender are inserted into articles that have little to nothing to do with the point of the article, there are plenty of other better examples he should’ve chosen over an op-ed that - even if the “offending” sentence was struck from the text - it would still be a mess of an article to try to read and understand.
"If you're talking about, say, a KKK resurgence, it's fine because it's relevant. If you're talking about almost anything else, it's not."
I would suggest that precisely the opposite is true.
If one is talking about the KKK, then such a reference is unnecessary, as it is well-known that the KKK is "overwhelmingly" (nearly universally, really) white and (at least supermajority) male.
Where it becomes relevant is where some movement or organization that is - at least in principle - racially and sexually neutral nonetheless is biased in some direction. If such a bias exists, then it might at least lead one to ask why that is the case.
What a bizarre position for Kevin and others to be taking. Was the characterization inaccurate? No? Kevin suggests it wasn't relevant, but apparently that point is so obvious that he doesn't need any argument in support. Calling out this writer for lazy writing, for not explaining clearly enough why it matters that overwhelmingly, a group of white male thinkers thought immortality through technology was possible without any follow-up, that would be fair.
But also false. The next paragraph:
"They were early transhumanists, the pseudo-intellectual offspring of eugenicists, with their hubristic quest to breed a master race and all of its consequent horrors: from the Holocaust to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people, mostly women of color and others labeled “defective.” Eugenicists thought there was such a thing as a perfect body; transhumanists went a step further to say perfection lay in select minds, which could transcend bodies altogether."
In other words, the root of their desire for a "perfect world" was the elimination of the body in a way which made these digital selves white and male.
How the heck is that not relevant, Kevin?
And how in the world is my ability to guess what's overwhelmingly white and male proving that the phrase has lost its meaning? Maybe the meaning is that too many things in American society remain FACTUALLY overwhelmingly white and male, and that's either a curious coincidence or a sign that a society created and regulated for centuries by a group of overwhelmingly white and male legislators, judges, doctors, etc is still struggling to be inclusive and to take minorities and women into account. Are you challenging that statement of fact? Or that, as face, it can be relevant to a bunch of things beyond overt racism? That medical outcomes for black women are worse during pregnancy? That too many studies relevant to those outcomes were conducted on volunteers who were "overwhelmingly white?"
If I said that the phrase "...the evidence shows that this, too, can be attributed to the overwhelmingly pervasive effects of lead on child development during this time period" doesn't allow me to clearly guess the subject, so you're just employing a cheap advertisement for your own work if you attribute anything to lead poisoning WHETHER OR NOT IT MATTERS, you'd rightly dismiss the argument as incoherent. So is yours.
Can anyone in the comments guess why there's such a statistical disparity between the way in which white Americans perceive racial issues in America and the way in which racial minorities perceive racial issues? And why white men keep insisting they get to be the ones to differentiate between "cheap racial... ridicule" and relevancy on racial issues? Or are the answers to those questions themselves off the table because they don't matter for some reason?
Kevin, you're clearly interested in and concerned by racial inequity. And you can hare off for hours to look for numbers on all sorts of topics. So perhaps it would have been worth a few moments more on this post.
For example, a Google Ngram search reveals this interesting fact:
Typing in "overwhelmingly white and male" reveals no usage in books before 1958, and a skyrocketing trendline after a dip in 2008. In 2019, the occurrence rate was 0.0000003045%.
For comparison, I tried "founding fathers." 1820 is the first usage; there's a spike between 1929 and 1949. After a peak in 2006, usage drops off, plummeting in 2019 to 0.00004292% of books. That's 140 times more usage in 2019 than "overwhelmingly white and male." Which one seems likelier to be a lazy usage which people should just quit already, and why?
Well said, KD. The pony crowd will hate it.
Oh Dear Lord. What is it with people who think feigned obtuseness is a winning argument? If I said that the libertarian crowd is largely white and male, everyone would know _exactly_ what I meant (Note, BTW, that the intersection of transhumanism and libertarianism is ... nontrivial.) Somebody up top commented that merely being white and male doesn't necessarily mean anything; most Noble Prize winners fall into that category after all. Oh really? Check out who really discovered dark matter. Here's the money quote after some discussion on galactic rotation curvers:
Examples are legion in the math world as well. Emmy Noether (one of my personal heroes; I am after all, an algebraist) faced ferocious discrimation working her way up the academic ladder.
Finally, I'll that transumhanism is merely ringing the changes in the gospel of the rapture of the nerds. The creed has many variances (whom the disciples of each, of course, ferociously disputed amongst themselves) and also ludicrously unfeasible on the technical and scienctific side for the foreseeable future.) They differ not at all from the ninety-six-year-old futurist who sez the Singularity is coming sometime in the next six months.
Why knock it off exactly? Almost any group that is not gender or race specific is dominated by white males.
I can understand that some white male may be annoyed when their dominance is mentioned all the time. But that does not change the fact that the uncomfortable phrase is everywhere for a reason.
“ Of course not. This phrase is used constantly for a nearly endless number of subjects. It could be anything. “
So true, Mr. Drum.