This Week in Tikvah Tablet's Tribute to George Floyd (4/25)
David Shasha
Responding to the George Floyd Verdict (1): Attack Critical Race Theory
I have already had my say on the ongoing battle between the Black Separatists and Black Neo-Cons:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ocCkHawJzrY/m/1ncbGXfaAQAJ
And I have dedicated an entire newsletter to the matter of Robin DiAngelo:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/c1_dJkCTKhw/m/Zq36INbHBwAJ
I suppose I have made my views on the matter of Critical Race Theory and its monetization pretty clear by now.
The well-paid Tikvah Tablet Sean Patrick Cooper celebrated the Chauvin conviction by publishing a piece attacking CRT and, especially, its monetary aspect:
We will recall that the Right Wingers have also been up in arms this week over BLM wealth:
https://townbroadcast.com/?p=41013
And Al Sharpton using Tyler Perry’s private jet to fly to Minneapolis:
https://nypost.com/2021/04/20/al-sharpton-blasted-for-private-jet-video-ahead-of-minneapolis-visit/
Cooper’s article, naturally, begins with the standard attack on the California Ethnic Studies curriculum:
For all the talk of this being a movement for social good, a new dawn for American students, and a solution to oppression, ethnic studies is also, crucially, very much a nascent but nationwide white-collar industry. Indeed, while evidence for its educational or even social value is hotly debated, what’s not in dispute is that the business of flipping the public education establishment on its head is beginning to pay—and very well.
Which leads to an unleashing on CRT money:
In California, what this means is that the state’s Department of Education will be pouring tens of millions of dollars into the hiring of new ethnic studies teachers, new ethnic studies administrators, and, most significantly, an army of expert consultants who will install and supervise the new curriculum in thousands of California classrooms. Moreover, the movement’s biggest players already started monetizing their expertise, even ahead of the new curriculum’s ratification, by racking up consulting fees from California schools that were early adopters of ethnic studies programs.
It was an excellent way to mark the Chauvin guilty verdict, as the name George Floyd was not uttered on Wednesday by Newhouse and her radical minions.
But even more than this, there was no discussion of Zalman Bernstein and the huge cash stockpile amassed by his progeny, who use their own version of Jewish Critical Race Theory to make the moolah.
Responding to the George Floyd Verdict (2): Prince and the Jews
I am not much on anniversaries, but this week was apparently the 5th anniversary of the death of Prince.
Here is my tribute – which has nothing to do with the Jews:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/tgOPP8cWhvE/m/jgp4cmgvAgAJ
Of course, Prince was a Minneapolis icon, so it is quite appropriate to do a Prince and the Jews article to mark the George Floyd verdict:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/neal-karlen-prince
Neil Karlen is very Ashkenazi!
On the other, pencil ever behind his ear, was the “flamboyantly engaging” motor mouth, Brown graduate, and former bar mitzvah tutor (Hebrew name Natan Shmuel), whose Yiddish-speaking grandfather made Shabbos wine under special governmental dispensation during Prohibition for his local Minneapolis synagogue. As a special Christmas gesture, he carried Mason jars of the runoff—“let’s be honest, several illegal batches”—to neighbors in his mostly Black neighborhood of North Minneapolis. This earned him the moniker “the Wine Jew,” a designation that “guaranteed my grandmother and him, both octogenarian foreigners, safety and popularity in the neighborhood.” Years later, a check of his grandfather’s logs revealed that one regular recipient of the Yuletide wine was Prince’s father, John Nelson.
When you think of Derek Chauvin and George Floyd, please remember the “Wine Jew”!
It is the Tikvah Tablet thing to do.
The Whore of Trump Projection: “The Elites are Harming Our Children”
As if it were not bad enough that Tikvah Tablet continues to publish the truly disgusting Norman Doidge, the Whore of Trump this week gave us yet another Lysol triumph:
It has the Trumpist “Liberate!”:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/trump-s-liberate-tweets-extremists-see-call-arms-n1186561
U.S. public health experts increasingly urge the reopening of schools, and yet much of the country still seems unable to do so. This is the most visible and, perhaps, most tragic consequence of the toxic environment surrounding discussions of how to respond to the pandemic that has been driven by a technocratic elite harboring a dim view of the public’s role in important discussions. Yet it is not the failure of the public, but rather of these self-appointed guardians of public discourse to glimpse their own shortcomings, that has crippled our national debate.
It has Trumpist “Herd Immunity”:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/16/trump-appointee-demanded-herd-immunity-strategy-446408
The simple, elite explanation for all our problems during the pandemic has been that the public failed to trust the experts and didn’t “follow the science.” This, they argue, is the result of tolerating too much skepticism, which is an ordinary feature of scientific debate. Instead, elites have openly embraced the notion that the public is better served by exaggeration, downplaying uncertainty, or even deception (such as in official estimates of herd immunity).
It has the elitist attack on Elites:
We’re frequently asked—especially by fellow elites—why we use the term “elite.” The moniker refers to university-credentialed experts in high-paying, usually urban-centric jobs, alongside the politicians and members of the media who enable them. Although the term has a long pedigree, it was repopularized by Christopher Lasch in his bestselling 1996 book The Revolt of the Elites, which criticized the belief system of America’s professional and managerial class. Many commentators increasingly link pathologies in our public sphere, including the populist backlash, to elites’ disconnection from the real experience of others. As philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in his recent takedown of meritocracy, elites exhibit relentless credentialism, embrace the argot of “smart versus dumb,” and have little time for the uninformed opinions of their fellow citizens. Sandel notes that elites misunderstand debates over facts and mischaracterize such arguments as a novel misinformation epidemic, as opposed to a longstanding feature of democratic debate. Increasingly, elites believe that all problems have technocratic solutions, and that they are uniquely qualified to identify them.
The article attacks being called “Trumpian”:
Many opponents of reopening questioned the motives of those advocating it, rather than their actual arguments. Supporters of reopening were labeled “conservative,” or more commonly, “Trumpian,” an ad hominem attack that has a corrosive impact within the liberal orthodoxy of academia. Those who paid the price for this kind of self-righteous name-calling and politically driven accusation were children.
Bad Faith Tikvah Tablet becomes Good Faith Tikvah Tablet!
The point is not about whether any particular scientist is right. Rather, it is simply not a healthy sign when good-faith discussion and uncertainty within the scientific community are labeled in media articles as a “dangerous distraction” or the result, as other scientists have charged, of a “hidden agenda.” Aside from driving out debate, this miscalibration is precisely what leads to an incredulous public unable to make sense of contradictory public health guidance. It leaves us in an epistemic vacuum where no one appears trustworthy.
Like the truly offensive idiot Doidge, Jacob Hale Russell has no specific expertise on COVID or epidemiology more generally:
https://www.jacobhalerussell.com/
He is a Law Professor working in the Social Sciences!
Most of my research looks at how insights from social sciences can inform legal policy design. For instance, I have written skeptically about the use of "nudging" to improve retirement savings decisions, and questioned the way many legal policies interpret individual tastes and preferences. I am also interested in intellectual history and am working on a research project about the evolution of ideas about the corporation, including debates over corporate social responsibility and personhood. I recently examined how ideas about contracts came to influence not-for-profits, enhancing the power and status of donors, and am continuing to write about the governance of charitable foundations. I am also interested in consumer protection and corporate governance. With my colleague Arthur Laby, I edited Fiduciary Obligations in Business, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
That is what passes for intelligent discourse in the Whore of Trump universe.
David Brooks Attacks Republican Trumpists, Praises Tikvah Tablet Trumpists!
We know just how confused David Brooks has been since his Reaganite ideals took a spin in the Trump cycle.
He likes Trump’s Reaganism, but is not very happy with Trumpism.
It was something that could be seen in his Friday column, “The G.O.P. is Getting Even Worse”:
He seems to understand that his Republican compatriots, the Hate America Right, are lunatics:
Those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.
The usual Mr. Rogers approach does not seem to be working:
What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.
After making the point, he goes right back to his usual Neo-Con pig trough, as he praises Alana Newhouse and her Trolling the Libs:
Over the last decade or so, as illiberalism, cancel culture and all the rest have arisen within the universities and elite institutions on the left, dozens of publications and organizations have sprung up. They have drawn a sharp line between progressives who believe in liberal free speech norms, and those who don’t.
There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
The Cancel Cancel Culture does not believe in “Liberal Free Speech Norms,” though Brooks does not seem to be aware of that. But more than even that egregious error, is Brooks’ ignorance of Michael Lind, Norman Doidge, and Liel Leibovitz with their pro-Lysol proclivities.
Brooks remains a tragic figure whose employment at The New York Times and PBS remains a complete mystery, and offensive to all thinking people.
David Shasha