Recently, my daughter's school district apparently made the mistake of posting a picture on FB of three happy young girls, two braiding the thirds hair, without (gasp!!!) the qualifier that the girl who's hair was being braided had given consent. Why? Because she was black and her friends were white. The school backpedaled and apologized for not addressing the micro-aggression one might assume without context. These are actual adults, who in their mind, are deftly navigating heretical waters. I can only hope that these three girls never were exposed to the school's apology and explanation, especially the young girl who in an effort to avoid heresy, they treated like a cultural artifact rather than a human being.
Yeah, that's obviously rediculous. Someone on the internet wanted a quick hit of moral supremacy and made some poor PR person's life worse for a day. I guess that's pretty emblematic of my feelings on "cancel culture" tho - people on the internet are being annoying but really it's mostly an internet problem. The school wanted good PR, they were needlessly attacked, they apologized anyways because the whole point was to get PR, life moves on. The only people really affected are entertainers where people's perception of them is what they're selling. I personally have a hard time enjoying something like standup if it's from a person who's views I hate. Meanwhile in my state of Florida, they just passed a bill allowing teachers to be individually sued for mentioning anything about gender, but none of the "cancel culture" types like PG seem to be nearly as upset. I guess it makes some amount of sense - people posting online a lot disproportionally care about what people online think. But really, 90% of the time a Twitter mob just makes it unpleasant to use Twitter. Which isn't great, but nowhere near the death of society. And the cancel culture articles almost always paint this as an exclusively left wing problem which is just not true at all. Left wing ppl have the Twitter numbers and can be annoying, whereas right wing cancel culture people are writing their hereseys into Law
Yeah, Graham definitely makes the mistake of thinking it's happening more on the left than the right. That's probably because relative to where he sits, the left has changed, whereas the right has not. The truth is that they have become more similar. Over the course of my life, the US right has always been guilty of purity tests and the hypocrisy that comes with it. It's relatively new for the left. The left used to be a place where progressivism was understood the compass, but irreverence for cultural mores kept people honest and sufferable.
Both the left and the right have abandoned their economic and geopolitical underpinnings due to the expense of running for office. The end result is that the left is made up of rich people who represent wealthy young white people while the right is made up of rich people who represent wealthy old white people. The left must throw sops to poor non-white people in order to be elected while the right must throw sops to poor white people in order to be elected. The thing that turns my stomach is people like Paul Graham think they're suffering under a system created and perpetuated exclusively for his benefit.
I suspect that he's on the spectrum. He has a very consistent Data-like blindspot in his modeling of other people. It's like he sees everyone as Paul Graham.The thing that turns my stomach is people like Paul Graham think they're suffering under a system created and perpetuated exclusively for his benefit.
Or maybe he just lacks empathy. CEOs and entrepreneurs are four times as likely to be psychopaths as the general population. (n=203)
The school acted appropriately. - Somewhere, a bored person with an axe to grind found a pain point. - That pain point was tested for purchase. - The school district rolled over because judo works against choke holds. No one will give a fuck tomorrow. Today? Today there are people desperately invested in making others give a fuck. What's the obsession with labeling this "heresy?" Heresy is, by definition, an assault on orthodoxy (look it up). The entire discussion here is over the consequences of heterodoxy. It's an intellectually lazy argument, an edgelord strawman, in which those in power punch down under the guise of liberty. It's fucking tedious. ZOMFG, a school district had to apologize on Facebook, they'll be burning copies of The Education of Little Tree soon.
If the school district apologized because they showed a picture of my daughter and her two white friends using chopsticks without "context", I would not feel it was appropriate. I would want to transfer her to a different school where people understand why doing so might be harmful to her.
I tried to opt out of letting my son's school ever post pictures of him on Facebook or other social media, as I was told was my right. Then the school called me and said that they can do that, but that they'll have to ask him to leave the room every time they take pictures, which is literally every time they do something fun. WHY Why do we feel we need to post pictures of anything on the internet, let alone kids just trying to enjoy themselves at school? I cannot express how much I despise big social media and what they've done to us as a society. Hatred of Zuckerberg should be one relatively easy thing for the right and left to coalesce around.
We had to sign a release. We did. One of our friends didn't. The end result was the school ceased to take pictures of any kids because the guy in charge of social media thought it was too much of a hassle to see who they had releases on and who they didn't - and we know for a fact that the school had releases for all but one kid. This is one dude who is too lazy to remember not to use pictures of Janie. There's a real need among the grey tribe to view all problems as systemic malice when individual incompetence adequately explains the problem. Take it to the principal and say "my kid's education is being interfered with for your social media channel." DONE. If, against all odds, that doesn't solve the problem, take it to the school board. You have an individual idiot, or a small cadre of idiots, who are allowed to function in their orbit because their idiocy is worth their utility. Raise the cost of that idiocy to those who must deal with it and their idiocy will be dealt with. This isn't rocket science.
As the father of a minority you are allowed, and equipped, to enter the fray and say "how dare you apologize for my daughter doing perfectly normal things." That provides the school the coverage to roll things back, and deflects the battle from them to you. You have the standing to raise this issue, they don't. Who is this "people" you're condemning here, by the way? You're acting as if the vast arrayed forces of the proletariat are indicting John Galt for thoughtcrime, instead of acting as if a 20-year-old unpaid intern is simply trying to navigate a minefield of entitled Karens. It takes a real lack of perspective to turn an HOA meeting into Dunkirk.