- I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo.
Nathan Robinson's response pretty much hits the mark: Pretty loud for being so silenced. I get the same feeling off these people as off the white nationalists who complain that white men are more oppressed than anyone else. They're either very deluded or speaking in bad faith.
Ever since reading Peterson's book I can't tell you how freaking often he pops up. Ten times this. While I have succesfully ignored Harris for quite some time now, he recently was on the Ezra Klein podcast. I don't recommend listening to it - it's not a good conversation, it doesn't really go anywhere, and I want my two hours back, but Ezra makes pretty much the same point to Harris. He doesn't see it as a problem. He doesn't really admit mistakes, period, because in this 'dark web' people are just meaner so one cannot look weak or nuanced. The term "neuroscientist" really needs bigger air quotes.Think of all the black leftists and liberals, or scholars of race, that Sam Harris or Dave Rubin could have on their shows if they wanted to: Eddie Glaude, Michelle Alexander, Cornel West, Adolph Reed, Angela Davis, Kiese Laymon, Peniel Joseph, James Forman, Paul Butler, Tommie Shelby, Robin D. G. Kelley, Cathy Cohen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Nina Turner, Bryan Stevenson, Nell Irvin Painter, Elizabeth Hinton, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Briahna Joy Gray. (Those are just a few names from the top of my head; given time I could produce a list ten times longer.) If Sam Harris had Ibram Kendi, author of a National Book Award winning history of racist ideas, on his show, Harris might finally come to understand why so many people react badly to Charles Murray’s work, and appreciate the multi-hundred year history of “racial intelligence difference” discussions serving to justify racist violence.
What I want to convince you of is that there’s a side of this you should become more curious about. You should be doing shows with people like Ibram Kendi, who is the author of Stamped from the Beginning, which is a book on racist ideas in America which won the National Book Award a couple of years back. People who really study how race and these ideas interact with American life and policy.
I've made politically incorrect gaffes in very politically correct left-leaning academic circles and felt everyone's stares bearing down on me. I felt kind of mortified. I said sorry, that was insensitive, and I learned something about my own instincts there. Surprisingly, society didn't collapse.
My Dad just sent this article to me a few hours ago. I only got to read the first couple paragraphs before leaving for work, but I was already wondering if there was a real point, or if it was an article using tumblr as a strawman-excuse to complain. ---------- Edit: This article has even less point than I expected. A bit of blaming everyone for everything, a bit of veiled moaning about political correctness, mostly some wouldn't it be nice if everything was nicer.