More blithe racism

[mickthinks]

Jen Shah, a Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison on Friday.

Now, I know nothing of Jen Shah or Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and I have no reason to doubt the merits of the case against her. Okay so she's guilty of a horrible crime and deserves her conviction and some kind of custodial sentence.

But 78 months seems a long time for this kind of crime and it sets me pondering, would she have been given that kind of tariff if she weren't quite so black?

[beyelzu]

The backlash began following an episode this past week of the YouTube show, “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.” Among other topics, Adams referenced a Rasmussen Reports survey that had asked whether people agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.”

Most agreed, but Adams noted that 26% of Black respondents disagreed and others weren’t sure.

The Anti-Defamation League says the phrase was popularized in 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the discussion forum 4chan but then began being used by some white supremacists.

Adams, who is white, repeatedly referred to people who are Black as members of a “hate group” or a “racist hate group” and said he would no longer “help Black Americans.”

“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams said on his Wednesday show.

Oh Noes, turns out Dilbert might be racist in completely unsurprising news.

[Ari]

It’s always fascinating to see how few narcissists courting extremist right wingers want to actually live around them.

I hadn’t realized before this that Adam’s lives in Danville, Ca. A rich area of Contra Costa County. The county as a whole is extremely liberal and <40% white. He’s essentially shoved himself into his mansion in a rich white area of a larger racially diverse extremely liberal area and peeps out from his protective mansion to tell everyone else they should segregate and vote Trump.

Like a yappy dog nipping at people from between its owner’s legs.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

80c4c63393e7c1c4.jpeg

[Stephen Maturin]

Adams was already something of a hero to the smooth-brained online edgelord community. Ah well, at least we're getting some decent artwork out of this.

show spoiler

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

6D383664-05AE-4753-955F-858549ED5CBE.jpeg

[beyelzu]

Texas Tech has suspended Mark Adams pending an investigation following an “inappropriate, unacceptable, and racially insensitive comment” made to a player last week.

Adams told Stadium that the comments he made were not racist, and that he was quoting a Bible verse when he told one of his players that there is “always a master and a servant.”

Gee, I can’t imagine why a basketball player might be bothered by that, but at least Adams didn’t spit on anybody

There was also a separate incident earlier in the season the school is also investigating in which Adams spit on the player. Adams told Stadium he had gone to the doctor, had a bad cough and slobbered on the player during the game.

“I can spit on you whenever I want to,” one person close to the situation said Adams responded to the player.

“I don’t remember ever saying that,” Adams said.

I would be more impressed with his refutation if he didn’t go with I do not recall.

Texas Tech Coach Mark Adams Suspended Pending Investigation - Stadium

[beyelzu]

This is just some dipshit on the slatestarcodex subreddit. It’s sort of a hyper rationalist group that is philosophically descended from Less Wrong.

Scott Alexander wrote this on substack.

Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade

Basically, it’s an attempt to argue against woke or politically correct or inclusive language.

Hyperstitions are things that are true because they are believed. Slurs are slurs because people think them so.

Here comes the blithe racism

All lives matter” is a hyperstitious slur. Taken literally, it’s an inoffensive sentiment, perhaps the most inoffensive one. My impression is that for the first week of its existence, it was mostly meant inoffensively, used by nice elderly people who thought it was a friendly amendment to the Black Lives Matter slogan. But once the media successfully convinced everyone that it was a racist attempt to erase black lives in particular, and that people would scream at you if you used it, then the only people who kept using it were ones who cared so little about BLM’s opinion that they didn’t mind - maybe welcomed - being screamed at. I think use of All Lives Matter had very low - maybe 51-49 - correlation with political opinion the first week it was in use. Now it’s probably 99-1.

And

Images can be hyperstitious slurs. Forty years ago, most people with Confederate flag bumper stickers on their cars were probably proud Southerners not trying to make a statement about race. Now if you still have a Confederate flag bumper sticker on your car, you’re either making a statement about race, or deliberately thumbing your nose at the prevailing signaling equilibrium - which is itself a statement about race. The campaign to turn the Confederate flag into a slur successfully turned it into a slur; its use now incurs much more suspicion (correctly incurs, in a purely Bayesian sense) than it did forty years ago.

I took mad exception to this one in particular because it’s fucking insane and decidedly ahistorical.

True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime” is a hyperstitious slur, in the sense that racists talk about it more than non-racists, this helps it become a signal for racism, the fact that it’s a known signal for racism causes non-racists to talk about it even less than they would otherwise, and the vicious cycle ends with it being a very strong signal for racism and non-racists avoiding mentioning it. This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, and you end up with situations where someone notices that some police department arrests more blacks than whites, accuses that specific police department of racism, and everyone is afraid to explain what’s going on. I think the accepted way around the problem in these very few situations where it’s absolutely necessary to talk about it is by adding “. . . but obviously this goes away when you adjust for poverty” at the end. Even though this statement is false, it successfully avoids the hyperstitious slur and lets you mention the fact in that one special-purpose case.

This one is pretty bad as well as far as blithe racism goes. The fiat statement that black people commit more crime isn’t the true fact that he makes it out to be. We know that for crimes where Black people commit roughly equal to white people (like drug use and drug dealing) that Black people are disproportionately likely to be arrested, convicted and incarcerated for those offenses. The measure of criminality is a measure of how likely the police are to arrest you and not much else. He doesn’t delve into that though. This seems common by these types of dipshits, they think they can get there through pure reason and rarely bother with pesky sources

Then one of his fans (the sub tends a bit culty imo)

As an immigrant who grew up in the South, I can say that the confederate flag is definitely benign in the eyes of a lot of people - or at least it was before the BLM reckoning. The origins of the confederate flag and its adoption as a cultural symbol for the south are undeniably racist, but for many people, it’s just a “southern pride” thing with no intention for it to be racist.
I always found it distasteful, but I knew so many people who were genuinely kindhearted and thought racism was abhorrent but just didn’t see the issue with the flag. They viewed it through a “Dukes of Hazard, I’m proud of being southern” lens rather than anything malicious.
It’s still obviously an issue, especially when they double down on it if confronted with its racist history, but I’m personally willing to say that the usage of the confederate flag by a lot of people is (or at least was until recently) benign rather than an attempt to signal anything on the issue of race.

And this is what I want to talk about. I see this sort of racist apologia from white and white passing folks who move to the south. In particular, I found it common in people who moved to Atlanta which tends much less backward than outside of Atlanta. They move to some white enclave near Alpharetta and then declare that they see no racism among their confederate flag waving neighbors.

That patina of southern politeness makes them think all the white peoples sure are nice. While he acknowledged the racist origins of the Confederate flag, his idea that the flag only became shitty after BLM and most southerners flying it just love the south ignores just decades of use by hate groups.

Im certain that people who fly that flag tell n word jokes. I know because I learned all of those jokes when I was a child. I know because southerners change when they hear my thick ass drawl and come to the conclusion that I must agree with them.

This dipshit may not think he is racist, but he is providing cover for racists at the very least.

[viscousmemories]

My impression is that for the first week of its existence, it was mostly meant inoffensively, used by nice elderly people who thought it was a friendly amendment to the Black Lives Matter slogan. ... I think use of All Lives Matter had very low - maybe 51-49 - correlation with political opinion the first week it was in use.

Why do these "hyperrationalist" types always seem to think their personal beliefs have the weight of empirical evidence?

[beyelzu]

I think it’s largely a matter of unchecked white male privilege and hyper rationalists start with a belief in a rational computer type brain and work from there.

This dude has an advanced science degree in psychology and has been writing fart sniffing blog posts on being super rational for years if not decades and yet he makes this horrendous logical error of assuming his experience lacks confirmation bias and selection bias.


Drawing sweeping generalizations on your limited experience as you think back to the past is just the worst possible way to determine what the prevalence of something was. Also it’s extra insane to think he could accurately tell the difference between 51 and 49 percent.

He also ignores the deplorable role in making a slur a slur. Progressives don’t make things slurs out of thin air after all.

But once the media successfully convinced everyone that it was a racist attempt to erase black lives in particular,

He apparently doesn’t think that white supremacists ever adopted all lives matter. Nope it’s just the evil media and progressives making it a slur for no reason.


I mean look at how he described the confederate flag when someone said it was always used that way

I used to believe this about the Confederate flag. What convinced me wasn't talking to many, many Southerners who all said it was innocent (maybe they were lying!) or even my own Southern family members (maybe they were lying or deluded). It was hearing a CCP sympathizer say, with complete honesty, that it was proper for China to ban the Tibetan flag, because there was no way anyone innocently used it to advocate for Tibetan independence, and it could only mean that you supported the serfdom and torture practiced by the old feudal Tibetan government. I wondered how anyone could be dumb enough to believe this for a second - obviously a previously independent subregion would be attached to its flag for non-evil reasons - and, as I usually try to do when I wonder how anyone could be so dumb as to believe something, I checked to see if there was anything of an identical form I believed. That one was a weird and awkward realization.
I agree that after several decades of hyperstitious cascade it's used that way more now.

I know he didn’t talk to any Black folks about that flag because polls have shown that 90 percent or so have thought it was racist for a very long time.


Also as a psychologist, dipshit should know that some things go under reported in surveys like racial animus, it’s naive to believe that everyone who says they just love the south and don’t know about it’s history are telling the truth when the Klan has been flying it at cross burnings for a hundred years. During civil rights movement, segregationists clearly articulated their position that apartheid was a distinctive element of southern culture. A hundred years prior, southerners argued the same thing about slavery,

A week before Georgia adopted the Confederate flag as part of its state flag (in response to Brown v Board) the governor hinted that he would use state militia to keep Georgia schools segregated.

I think he would say that progressives made the okay hand symbol a slur, when it was the racists who adopted it and used it as a slur.

Also the whole thing is frightfully prescriptivist.

[LarsMac]

I find it interesting how everybody settled down when Georgia removed the Virginia Battle flag from their state flag, and no one has yet seemed to care that the new flag is an ever-so-slight variation of the CSA national Flag.

Coincidence?

[beyelzu]

So Jason Aldean who was born in Macon Georgia and is a Bulldawg fan did not in fact attend my beloved alma mater.

This fact makes me happy given the recent news.

So back in May, Aldean released a song called Try That in a Small Town, when I heard there was some controversy, I saw the title and I thought what try to live as openly gay or lesbian or trans or mix raced, but nah, it’s basically an anthem to Subdown towns.

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it's cool, well, act a fool if ya like
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you're tough
Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't
Try that in a small town
Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they're gonna round up
Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck
Try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't
Try that in a small town
Full of good ol' boys, raised up right
If you're looking for a fight
Try that in a small town
Try that in a small town
Try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't
Try that in a small town
Try that in a small town
Ooh-ooh
Try that in a small town

And the racism was blithe for a couple of months but eventually non-troglodytes heard the song.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66248807.amp

And from the video

The video was filmed in front of a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. Critics noted that a white mob lynched a young black man, Henry Choate, from the building in 1927.

I know the south is fucked up, but they do have courthouses that weren’t infamous lynching sites.

[Stephen Maturin]

A true Wingnut of the South would have put the Stars and Bars or CSA battle flag over the spot on that courthouse where Choate got murdered instead of that freedom-hating U.S.A. flag.

Disgraceful.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Probably not EU compliant site, so do what you need to:

A Black Man Was Elected Mayor in Rural Alabama, but the White Town Leaders Won’t Let Him Serve

So here’s some fun parts:

Two years ago, Braxton says he was the only volunteer firefighter in his department to respond to a tree fire near a Black person’s home in the town of 275 people. As Braxton, 57, actively worked to put out the fire, he says, one of his white colleagues tried to take the keys to his fire truck to keep him from using it.

In another incident, Braxton, who was off duty at the time, overheard an emergency dispatch call for a Black woman experiencing a heart attack. He drove to the fire station to retrieve the automated external defibrillator, or AED machine, but the locks were changed, so he couldn’t get into the facility. He raced back to his house, grabbed his personal machine, and drove over to the house, but he didn’t make it in time to save her. Braxton wasn’t able to gain access to the building or equipment until the Hale County Emergency Management Agency director intervened, the lawsuit said.

“When I first became mayor, [a white woman told me] the town was not ready for a Black mayor,” Braxton recalls.

The town is 85% Black

[beyelzu]

Middle school students in Florida will soon be taught that slavery gave Black people a “personal benefit” because they “developed skills.”

After the Florida Board of Education approved new standards for African American history on Wednesday, high school students will be taught an equally distorted message: that a deadly white mob attack against Black residents of Ocoee, Florida, in 1920 included “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

Florida Schools Will Teach How Slavery Brought ‘Personal Benefit’ to Black People

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Permanent generational internships.

[BrotherMan]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Probably not EU compliant site, so do what you need to:

A Black Man Was Elected Mayor in Rural Alabama, but the White Town Leaders Won’t Let Him Serve

So here’s some fun parts:

NO DAGBLAMMIT. I SAID THE MAYOR WAS NEAR.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Going to Target in blackface and demanding to see the Pride section to own the libspic.twitter.com/HUzmS59I08

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) August 3, 2023

[specious_reasons]

You know how much Twitter has gone to shit because this has 2.7K likes.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by specious_reasons

You know how much Twitter has gone to shit

It's Xitter now, pronounced Shitter

[beyelzu]

12ft ladder link to Bew Yorker article

The article is about Americans music which is more or less country music if you have something to say that isnt just banal patriotic/Dixie nonsense or if you are a person of color or a non-cis Het dude bro

The story talks about Nashville and how there are progressives there and Black, lgtbq+, and many women who make country music but it’s Americana.

It’s a good article, I want to check out some of the bands they mention. I love lots of Americana.

I never cared for most country growing up, for many years Johnny Cash was an exception. Now I listen to a good bit of country, but it tends to be more Americana.

The article even points out that artists like Tracy Chapman and Bill Withers would have probably been considered country if not for their race.

The writer though said this

For Nashville musicians, 2020 became a dividing line. Big stars died, among them John Prine, the flinty songwriter, and Charley Pride, the genre’s first Black star.

How the fuck you going to disrespect Ray Charles like that?

Literally his first record to top Billboard was Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Sturgill Simpson (a country artist that I love) made an album called Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and I read something about that album and found out that the title was a reference to Charles’s album.

Yeah Ray had like 44 singles on RandB and only 2 country, but the author notes that from the earliest days country sound was split with Black artists being labeled R and B and country being poor white music.

Charles is literally in the country music hall of fame.

The author may have meant that Charley Pride only sang country, but I found the lack of mention of Charles weird given the context.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by beyelzu

but the author notes that from the earliest days country sound was split with Black artists being labeled R and B and country being poor white music.

But the poor whites have absolutely no one on their side. Can't they at least have country music

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Newest "anti-woke" tantrum: Right-wingers don't think kids of different races can be friends | Salon.com

[LarsMac]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Newest "anti-woke" tantrum: Right-wingers don't think kids of different races can be friends | Salon.com

Shit. My first few years of school, in California, we were a friggin' Rainbow.
It wasn't 'til we moved to Alabama that I was in a segregated school, where I got beat up several times for being social with "them niggers". (Never did "learn that lesson.")

I made sure my kids were always in integrated schools.

[specious_reasons]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Newest "anti-woke" tantrum: Right-wingers don't think kids of different races can be friends | Salon.com

TBH, this isn't strictly anti-woke nonsense. My oldest made a friend at school in 1st grade, but got rejected when the girl's parents refused to let them play together.

The difference is mostly that this was a personal bias on the part of the parents and not trying to turn this into policy.