Verboten Realities
Lifted from the comments, here’s an interview with Professor Amy Wax. Topics touched on include academia’s practised unrealism, declining competence, and the seeming irrelevance of whether a thing is true:
I did read John McWhorter’s piece [on me] – John and I were friends for a very long time… I’m surprised at some of the things he says in that piece. I’m grateful for the fact he says I shouldn’t be punished… But for him to call what I say “demeaning,” or that it somehow undermines trust, a lot of that is puzzling.
You know, the word truth never appears in his op-ed… Usually, it was falsehoods that undermine trust, back in the good old days, and truth that supported trust. Now they’ve turned that completely on its head. Whether what I said is true or not seems completely irrelevant.
The discussion, at 24:45, of who gets to define extremism – and, very much related, The Party Of Shoplifting – is, I think, entertaining and rather on-the-money.
Professor Wax and her saying of The Unsayable have been noted here before.
That needs to be a meme.
Well, as a broad directional yardstick, a snapshot of ideological and moral difference, the excusing and enabling of habitual, emboldened criminality is not a trivial point, or unrelated to broader concerns.
And examples of the prevailing twistedness, the most modish ‘progressive’ attitudes, aren’t exactly hard to find.
Legalizing shoplifting (which is the effect of what they’ve done) sounds like extremism to me.
I repeatedly encounter that attitude among liberals I know: We must say (or not say) various things because of how they may make Certain People feel. And thus pronouns become mandatory. Racial differences in achievement and crime become verboten. And so on.
That reminds me: There was supposedly an episode of the Glenn Show podcast sometime in the last year which I’d meant to listen to but lost track of, in which Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss racial differences in crime rates and while they agree that blacks do offend at a significantly higher rate nonetheless the police and courts should treat blacks more leniently for the sake of racial reconciliation because black paranoia is real and can only be assuaged if blacks stop going to prison so often.
Has anyone here listened to that podcast?
Charles Murray weighs in on Amy Wax vs. the thought police. (All but the first four paragraphs are behind a paywall.)
It is a common ploy for liberal and left-wing fascists to excuse censorship and punishment of dissenting views on the basis of “civility”: The left is allowed to use vicious, demonizing, and even inciteful rhetoric, but conservatives are required to pussyfoot around controversial issues.