What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?
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I listened to Ezra Klein's podcast today, which is released under the banner of the New York Times. The episode was enticingly titled "How Identity Politics Took Over the Republican Party". It was an hour long discussion about how the Republican base is motivated almost entirely by racial animosity. How, as white Christian males, they are threatened by the notion of no longer being on top of the social hierarchy. None of this is debated or debatable, it's just the accepted and obvious premise from which the conversation begins.
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Coleman Hughes, young African American free thinker and public intellectual, has a podcast which is now 50 episodes old. He's had some good, interesting guests on. Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, Noam Chomsky, Bret Weinstein, Ezra Klein, Loury, McWhorter...
I just listened to the Charles Murray one, who's written another book on race and IQ. Not because he wanted more of the attention that he'd gotten for The Bell Curve, but because he feels that the woke messaging about systemic white supremacy being to blame for all racial disparities, is destroying the culture. He thinks the achievement gap is an intractable problem that will never be solved. So, he wrote another book asking people to acknowledge realities of IQ differences. Since we'll inevitably attribute achievement gaps to something, he thinks IQ gap is a more socially stable idea than systemic white supremacy.
Coleman made the counter-argument I'm sympathetic to. That kids shouldn't be told that people of their skin color are on average different, and lesser, by such a viscerally important measure. No caveat about overlapping distributions is going to soften that basic idea. In fact that's my issue with CRT - it teaches the culture that white people hate black people, and we all go into our social and professional interactions with that basic idea implanted. The white person is the only one with full knowledge of whether they are actually rooting for the black person to succeed. What's the black person to think, if they've been taught conspiracy theories their whole lives about what must be going on in the minds of white people?
I would differ with Murray most strongly in his contention that we've done all we can possibly do to solve the problem, and that what we're left with is an acknowledgment and a mainstreaming of the idea of racial IQ differences. If most of the problematic people come from subcultures of terrible parenting and disastrous neighborhoods, we're losing a lot of good people to the effects of the culture they were born into rather than the effects of their genetics. And we are clearly not doing everything we can to fix those cultures, since as we speak the left is busy warmly accepting it and even romanticizing it.
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Btw I think Coleman is a smart guy, but he's catching on not because of the depth of his insight. He is in the business of picking the plentiful low hanging fruit available to any reasonable and intelligent person of color who wants to go against the epicenter of dumb in our culture - our mainstream ideas about race.
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Really good discussion with Shelby Steele and his son, who made a documentary on the kid from Ferguson who got himself shot. How that narrative was bent into fantasy to conform to the race narrative, how that narrative is entirely about the acquisition of political and cultural power, how Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder were complicit in that power grab. Personally, I'm convinced that nothing gives the lives of white progressives more meaning than a juicy anecdote about a white cop killing a black person. I think it literally induces orgasms in some. Meanwhile, that fictitious narrative continues to damage the culture in general, and the psyches of black children in particular.
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McWhorter was on Sam Harris' podcast today. Good discussion, and of course McWhorter has good ideas. Never touched upon was the idea that only someone of his skin color can say them publicly. It would be nice to have that acknowledged. I'm not entirely sure WcWhorter himself is comfy with acknowledging it. Maybe he thinks he's an academic and thinker that just happened to excavate this truth before anybody else did.
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@horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Never touched upon was the idea that only someone of his skin color can say them publicly.
He notes that all the time on Loury’s podcast. Also last night I started his new book and he mentions that in the first chapter. Says he has an obligation to publish the book because a white guy couldn’t.
DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr -
@jon-nyc said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
@horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Never touched upon was the idea that only someone of his skin color can say them publicly.
He notes that all the time on Loury’s podcast. Also last night I started his new book and he mentions that in the first chapter. Says he has an obligation to publish the book because a white guy couldn’t.
That's good.
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I couldn't pass up today's episode of Ezra Klein's podcast, released under the banner of The New York Times Opinion. It was titled "how far right extremism has invaded politics". Ezra is on vacation, so has a guest host. The show was a conversation between two progressive white women, the host a journalist and the guest an historian. It was a very solemn and very serious discussion of the existential threat of white supremacy. The best part to me was the framing of January 6, which was brought up repeatedly. These two serious thinkers, one of whom is in fact the sort of person who will write grade school textbooks for modern American history classes, managed to pontificate about the root causes of January 6 without once mentioning election theft. It was all white supremacy, soup to nuts, white supremacy all the way down. The magic of human perception of culturally received ideas is that both of those serious and solemn thinkers probably believe that.
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There is a podcast about the "Theranos" case called Dropout.
(https://abcaudio.com/podcasts/the-dropout/)
I think we may have discussed this podcast on the previous forum board, and I know there were a couple of forum threads about the company and case, etc.
Anyway, there are new episodes now that the trial has started, and I have been listening to the new episodes.
Quite interesting.
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G George K referenced this topic on
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Just listened to the most recent episode of The Glenn Show, a conversation with a conservative academic named Amy Wax. Even someone as cynical about American culture as I am was a little taken aback by this truth bomb conversation between two adherents to truth and reality. I recommend our left leaning friends on TNCR not listen to this podcast, the truth bomb may induce too much cognitive dissonance and you may go even crazier than you already are.
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She wrote a good book called “Race, Wrongs, and Remedies” where she makes the crucial and generally overlooked distinction between ‘liability’ and ‘remedy’ when it comes to (white) society’s role in improving the lot of black America.
I’ll definitely listen, I’m a regular listener of his show.
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One of the best rabbit holes I've found:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/studs-terkel-archive-podcast/id1547088563
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Education is extremely important.
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Interesting interview with Larry Summers - who does a nice analysis of the inflation situation - likely recession and what interventions might be most useful.
