They Sell Failure
From a needlessly indulgent New York Times piece on Robin DiAngelo and her fellow clown-shoe race-hustlers:
[Marcus] Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.” Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it. A perverse and pernicious way, I’d suggest, and an obvious blueprint for degrading, perhaps irreparably, the lives and opportunities of those sufficiently credulous to internalise it. Unless, of course, the cultivation of tardiness, self-absorption, and lack of focus, along with a disregard for deadlines, standards and obligations, and a disdain for reciprocity, will somehow catapult minority students into gainful employment. But such is the way of the woke. Or of “equity transformation specialists,” in Mr Moore’s case.
One might instead argue that this supposedly “white” “obsession” with “mechanical time” – which is to say, basic foresight and punctuality – or just adulthood – has very little to do with oppressing the negro, as Mr Moore claims, and rather more to do with courtesy and treating other people as if they were real, just as real as you, and no more deserving of delays, frustration, or gratuitous disrespect. It seems to me that punctuality is not only about getting things done, about practicality and cooperation, but about getting over yourself. And presumably, Mr Moore – the one reducing black children to strange and otherly beings, unmoored by mere temporal concerns – would prefer his payments for this claptrap, aired to teachers and school administrators, to materialise promptly. Not, say, three weeks late. Or hey, whenever.
Update, via the comments:
Nikw211 notes,
Adherence to clock time is ‘democratic’ insofar as the same standards and expectations apply to all members of society regardless of status. For instance, it is not only the student that has to be on time, but also the teacher, where respect for good time-keeping has to be demonstrated, and demonstrated consistently, as a rule that applies to everyone. Only in undemocratic and rigidly hierarchical “big man” communities, where the strongest and most powerful are free to ruin the lives of others for any reason or for none at all, do you commonly find poor time-keeping used as a symbolic way of humiliating the vulnerable and more powerless.
Well, quite. And again, it’s interesting just how often woke posturing entails a rejection of reciprocity. It’s practically a signature.
Punctuality is, among other things, a gesture of recognition, of empathy. You’re acknowledging the other person as mattering, as someone whose time is as finite as your own and no less valuable. And if someone exempts themselves from such reciprocal expectations – having been encouraged to do so by supposedly grown-up educators – then it seems likely they will do less well in life, whether socially or materially. To pick a humdrum example – if a schoolfriend’s mom invites you to join them for tea, and you turn up an hour late, unapologetic and still expecting to be fed, this is not an obvious basis for congratulation. Or a second invitation.
From this childhood example, you can, I think, extrapolate.
Update 2:
And that’s the thing about adherents of “equity” ideology – a term that seems to mean something like “equality of outcome regardless of inputs.” They disdain the habits of bourgeois life as something to be done away with, at least for certain favoured groups, while expecting the rewards of those same bourgeois habits.
Previously, this and this. Via Julia. 
Along with “‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.”
Consider the implication of this remarkable assertion: that blacks cannot speak proper English, cannot think in an objective, rational, linear fashion, cannot think quantitatively, cannot put work before play, cannot plan (including “for the future” is a pleonasm), and cannot adhere to “rigid” time schedules.
In short, they are doomed to perpetual Third Worldhood, because it’s intrinsic to their nature.
Is that really the message that these race-hustlers want to send?
Oops. No idea how I posted that twice. Sorry.
Oops. No idea how I posted that twice. Sorry.
Someone fetch the Stone of Chastisement.
that blacks cannot speak proper English, cannot think in an objective, rational, linear fashion, cannot think quantitatively, cannot put work before play, cannot plan (including “for the future” is a pleonasm), and cannot adhere to “rigid” time schedules.
You don’t say.
And yet every single person who decries punctuality as an expression of whiteness expects to get paid on time.
To some degree, I’m starting to view this as a variation of the Nazi mentality of Liebestraum.
Posted by: WTP | July 21, 2020 at 15:57
I guess autocorrect is responsible for that, and you meant “Lebensraum”. Interesting. Give non-whites the metaphorical “room” by systematically giving them the jobs whites would normally have.
But once you are gone, they don’t understand what happens next.
I guess they don’t follow the news about Zimbabwe. Or maybe they do, and while they supervise and theorize, they expect white people to do all the work or be punished. Hmm, where have I heard that before?
Oops. No idea how I posted that twice. Sorry.
It’s bears repeating. 🙂
Heh. Yeah, the “living room” thing, not the Liszt thing. Though I suppose wet dream isn’t that bad of a metaphor as well.
Just thinking…as I previously screwed the pooch in a job negotiation by simply asking if the client was a supporter of BLM, considering this line of interview…
I wonder what would happen if I ask if the company looking to hire me gives “colored people”, or whatever the proper term is these days, more time to complete tasks and does not expect them to think or perform in a logical or linear fashion, how that would/could/should be handled? I mean, it’s a legitimate question from either a woke or “racist” perspective. Especially if I’m being interviewed for a leadership role.
To pick a humdrum example – if a schoolfriend’s mom invites you to join them for tea, and you turn up an hour late, unapologetic and still expecting to be fed, this is not an obvious basis for congratulation.
If the antecedent of an objective pronoun is “a schoolfriend’s mom,” don’t you think, Mr. Thompson, that you might go all the way out on a limb and use the pronoun “her”?
Do not surrender to the illiterate singular “they.”
My father would say “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.”
He loathed being late and when others would arrive late.
Late people suck. Therefore the venerable military adage “If I’m not early, I’m late.”
As has been noted already, a cheap, easy and effective way to demean/devalue someone, and to demonstrate your power over them, is to simply make them wait for you.
But it appears we need not worry about these crusty, antiquated notions of courtesy and graciousness anymore. Time and the clocks that tell it are now racist.
(what’s the whitest holiday?)
Now that is weapons grade badspeech!
Is that really the message that these race-hustlers want to send?
The only message they are interested in sending is “gibsmedat”
eggo:
To pick a humdrum example – if a schoolfriend’s mom invites you to join them for tea, and you turn up an hour late, unapologetic and still expecting to be fed, this is not an obvious basis for congratulation.”
If the antecedent of an objective pronoun is “a schoolfriend’s mom,” don’t you think, Mr. Thompson, that you might go all the way out on a limb and use the pronoun “her”? Do not surrender to the illiterate singular “they.”
I would respectfully suggest that there’s a world of hurt between “to join them” – i.e. schoolfriend, mother, possibly father, possibly other siblings, possibly other friends of schoolfriend – and “to join her” – i.e. mother only, which might be fun for both mother and invitee, but might well be illegal…
It’s to show they can.
Fidel Castro was the poster boy for this particular tyrant’s tell. He reveled, with great frequency, in making his subjects pay respectful attention to speeches that lasted several hours, for decades.
OK, so if all this blather about the corrupt ‘virtues’ of whiteness are true, what is the alternative? How do these people think black students should be taught? And what results do they expect to see?
That’s actually quite a deep question. There are various answers depending on who exactly you mean. After all, look at Castro or Chavez – what they clearly expected was to get personally extremely wealthy and that worked fine. That it was hideously inefficient, destroying the wealth of the rest of the nation, was clearly not important.
For others, as I observe, I come to think of “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” as more prophetic all the time. I think sometimes we are witnessing the reversion of the process described there, with ever more bicameral minds wandering about. For the one thing a true progressive lacks is the ability to introspect, a hallmark of consciousness. They don’t “expect” anything, as that would be introspective. They just do, in a gestalt lacking the concept of “cause and effect”.
In a class of 20 there are usually about 3 people who wander in around 9:15 a.m. but we have already started – they are embarrassed and need to catch up – we don’t redo stuff for latecomers.
I had a professor who would *lock the door* at 5 past. Those arriving within the 5 minutes got silence and a stare which followed them from the door to their seat, at which point he would resume *in mid-sentence*, or near thereto. VERY few repeat customers. I think only one or two (girls, iirc) complained to the Department Head, who only asked one question: Were you late?
Of course that was long ago in a galaxy far far away.
“Someone fetch the Stone of Chastisement.”
No. No. No! You must sit in the comfy chair, and stay in the chair until lunch time with only a cup of coffee at 11.
Since no one expects the Spanish Inquisition for diabolically signalling by posting twice.
“It’s to show they can.”
*Real* power is to have them so scared, that you only need speak for a few minutes, but they dare not stop clapping for hours….
Meanwhile you can leave the stage and sit in the comfy chair, awaiting its next victim…
Ooops. We’ll be needing that stone after all.
And someone light up the sign over the bar—I’m off to work in a moment or I’d do it.
Do not surrender to the illiterate singular “they.”
You’re not having tea alone with your schoolfriend’s mom. She won’t be touching your knee or anything, while wearing a low-cut blouse. The school friend will be there too, and his sister, and his dad. Hence they.
someone light up the sign over the bar
Clearly, we need a bigger one.
Clearly, we need a bigger one.
I know a man, his name is Lang,
And he has a neon sign.
And Mister Lang is very old,
So they call it Old Lang’s Sign.
After hearing some grumbling about the text of the blog being too small for old eyes, or something to that effect, I’ve enlarged it. However, the degrees of adjustment aren’t exactly fine and now I can’t decide if the main text looks too big.
Thoughts?
I’ve enlarged it.
Ah, is that what just happened . . . . Ehn, I’m resetting the browser resolution amount as result, but at the moment I’m reading a 14 inch screen instead of a 30 inch monitor . . .
It’s a bit of a faff trying to find some happy medium for all conceivable reading devices – PCs, laptops, phones, tablets, etc. The whole thing’s due for an overhaul, but that entails more expertise than I possess, and therefore entails expense.
It’s a bit of a faff trying to find some happy medium for all conceivable reading devices
A few months back I picked up a laptop with a 17 inch 4K screen . . . and then got to have the bemusement and amusement of multiple software packages that had yet be upgraded to situations with a 4K resolution…
David Foster Wallace (2001) –
For one thing, Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively—via “freewriting,” “brainstorming,” “journaling”—a view of writing as self-exploratory and-expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology.
For another thing, the very language in which today’s socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmental movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair.
my immediate thought is that someone has taken all the negro stereotypes of the antebellum south and decided, not to debunk them, but to reframe them as virtues.
Well, quite. And yet they imagine themselves as the heroes of their own mental drama.
It’s a tragedy in slow motion.
It feels like a kind of civilisational rot. In the instance above, there’s an extraordinary disregard for, an antipathy towards, a basic but important behavioural norm. When you arrange to meet someone at a given time and they make plans accordingly, perhaps prioritising you over something else, you’re making a promise. By being late casually and repeatedly, with no expectation of actually keeping your word, of delivering on your promise, of sparing others needless inconvenience, you’re telling the rest of us that you can’t be relied upon. And not just in terms of punctuality.
It’s a strange message to encourage people to send to the rest of us, and to feel righteous in sending.
I’m seeing it as a mashup of 1984 and Atlas Shrugged. The worst of both worlds.
Including the turgid prose.
It’s worth noting that “equity,” a word favoured by Mr Moore and other activist clowns, is usually defined only in the woolliest and most evasive of terms. Given the assumed connotations of fairness, it sounds unobjectionable; but when used by activists, it seems to mean something like “equality of outcome regardless of inputs.” Which isn’t fair at all.
And that’s the thing about adherents of “equity” ideology. They disdain the habits of bourgeois life as something to be done away with, at least for certain favoured groups, while expecting all of the rewards of those same bourgeois habits.
Including the turgid prose.
Heh. I almost threw in a reference to the writing style as well, especially in regards to AS, but wasn’t sure how to express it. Great minds think alike. Pity no one listens to us.
Do not surrender to the illiterate singular “they.”
Matt. 18:35: So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.
A Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3: There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me, As if I were their well-acquainted friend
Sure, if you want to assert that the KJV and Shakespeare are appalling bad modern trendy English, go for it. I’m sure you’re better than the best English ever written. Not.
A Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3
Again, just to clarify – in the scenario above, you’re not having some off-the-books encounter with said schoolfriend’s mom. It’s all above-board and there are other people present. No slipping bra straps or flashes of thigh.
That would be a whole different kind of blog post. And a different kind of blog.
It’s all above-board and there are other people present. No slipping bra straps or flashes of thigh.
Yes. But the low-cut dress. Can you tell more about that? You…you can tell it as slow as you like. I’ve got time…
[ Fetches spray-bottle of hamster urine. ]
Is everybody coping with the new Enormo-Text™…? Customer feedback, people.
Customer feedback, people.
I usually view this via my iPad (hence my hunt-and-peck typing that gets me in trouble…see above), but TBH I haven’t noticed a difference. My sympathies on your efforts. Reason number 17 why I have little interest in UI development. As interesting as the new tools are, the plethora of platforms is a nightmare for the OCD (or even quasi-OCD) afflicted.
Now about that low-cut dress…
Customer feedback, people.
Do what you must, kind host, and we’ll adjust the decades-old zoom feature accordingly…
but TBH I haven’t noticed a difference.
[ Bursts into tears, throws scarf over shoulder, slams door. ]
They disdain the habits of bourgeois life as something to be done away with, at least for certain favoured groups, while expecting the rewards of those same bourgeois habits.
That.
Are you asking if everybody can cope or if everybody cares for it or no?
It’s a bit startling at first but not something to set off ructions.
It’s a bit startling at first…
Heh. I believe the words you’re looking for are confident and bold.
Are you asking if everybody can cope or if everybody cares for it or no?
Well, both. Is it a bit much? Does it seem… er, shouty? Not that there’s a great deal I can do about it, really. Not without forking out for a makeover by someone who knows what they’re doing. For the time being, it’s this or how it was yesterday, which some complained was difficult to read. I suppose as much as anything it depends on what you’re using to read it.
It’s worth noting that “equity,” a word favoured by Mr Moore and other activist clowns, is usually defined only in the woolliest and most evasive of terms.
As always, the devil is in the detail.
(Sos about the lack of italics. My old machine wants nothing to do with them)
Sos about the lack of italics.
You’d be amazed, or at least amused, by how much time I must spend discreetly italicising things.
[ Discreetly italicises relevant part of Watcher’s comment. ]
Customer feedback, people.
At first I checked my browser zoom setting but I have to admit, I like it.
. . . at the moment I’m reading a 14 inch screen instead of a 30 inch monitor . . .
Hmmm . . . and back at a 30 inch monitor, the oddity I’m noting is that while the display text that is posted can be adjusted, everything being typed into the text window keeps coming up as utter microtext, even when the browser is adjusted so that the rest of the screen comes up as even larger Godzilla text.
—Based on this, I don’t have an impression of Typepad being able to play nicely.
On an other hand, with ctrl-+ and -, I’ve seen browsers tend to be a bit more responsive when adjusting text size, so mebbe the occasional browser adjustment comment may be a solution for text size visibility. . . .
[ Bursts into tears, throws scarf over shoulder, slams door. ]
. . . Someone be sure to fish David’s scarf off the floor before the sausage roll gets to it . . .
Re text: I read this blog on my laptop, and change screen size almost unconsciously, so didn’t realise it had changed. Many apologies.
As for Eggo’s point about singular they/their and subsequent comments – while in our gracious host’s original example, the subject was plural, there is a major push to use singular they ahistorically. It’s quite true that they/their has been used for a singular possessive when the gender of the antecedent noun is unknown – we do that quite naturally all the time – or when the noun is formally singular but semantically plural, as in the examples from Shakespeare and the Bible above. (It’s obvious that brother and man refer to people in general.)
What’s happening now, though, is that the Woke brigade are insisting it should be used when the gender is perfectly clear, so one reads sentences like ‘[Sam] Smith has stumbled plenty of times as they tried to talk as effectively about queer history as their music does about loneliness. But each time, Smith picks themself back up and made the same pledge:they’re going to learn; they’re going to educate themself; they’re going to be better.’ Having seen multiple examples of this, I imagine that Eggo has extended his* dislike of this confusing syntax to the historic (though generally informal) use of singular their.
*His was for centuries the accepted usage in formal writing when gender was unknown.