You gentlemen have performed an incalculable service to us all during a period--I'm talking about the last several years--when intellectual and ethical bravery was in very short supply. I've come to appreciate not just the space that the two of you hold down, but the moments when your views diverge, or surge with unexpected emotion. The dialogic space is cozy, sometimes, but then Dr. Loury steelmans a progressive claim--"Wait a minute, John. What would you say to somebody who argues that.....?" And John listens, volleys, thinks it through and occasionally revises on an as-needed basis. All the while, you're collectively modeling a kind of long-form inquiry that seems imperiled by the hot takes of social media and the cancel culture it feeds. I'm schooled in multiple ways every time you gentlemen get together, not least because you've been tag-teaming like this for a good long while and engaging deeply with earlier variants of these issues for even longer. So great that this recognition is happening now. Keep the faith!
Thank you Prof Loury for introducing us to the work of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's "Spiral of Silence" theory in your tribute article to John McWhorter. It provided an interesting context as to why false narratives are so pervasive among the woke contingency and its affect on those that do not share their point of view.
I can't begin to thank you and John enough for successfullly penetrating the cloud of woke smoke over the years with all of your thoughtful, passionate, knowledge delivered with the masterful precision of an intellectual olympian which has helped so many of us to breathe.
Spiral of silence - echoes of Arend's en mass not thinking for oneself and squashing the moral intuition that what is morally wrong remains so even if it is legally justified (which is what, in effect, the Nazis effected - but not saying 'this is fascism' - but authoritarian, yes.)
“Though overt censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat arises from the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech that creates a spiral of silence. As John Stuart Mill recognized in his masterwork, On Liberty, it is not the iron fist of state repression but rather the velvet glove of society’s seduction that constitutes the real problem.”
Thank you for this, one of the most eloquent and insightful passages I have read on any topic this year.
Spiral of silence -- a powerful insight that deserves careful pondering.... As I watch the socio/political discourse degenerate, the example that this article provides (and JFBT at large) is very compelling. Keep up the good work! But, dare I say, step on the gas? There is so much at stake!
Succinctly stated. True. John McWhorter and Professor Loury have advanced a holistic lens on this topic to counter the liberal penchant to presume the right to speak on this topic narrowly for the outcome of increased democratic political power. Thank you!
Economics! I asked a PhD economist from the University of Chicago to explain how an automobile engine worked. He couldn't even start. What has planned obsolescence had to do with economics since Sputnik? We hear GDP all of the time, NDP not so much. But the NDP equation does not take the depreciation of durable consumer goods and therefore planned obsolescence into account.
The last 500 years of history is the result of who had technology vs who didn't. Black Americans place too much emphasis on race instead of sci/tech. Oh yeah, reading a book is "acting white". Were the Japanese acting white when they bombed Pearl Harbor? Try:
Black Man's Burden & Border, Breed nor Birth by Mack Reynolds
(The screen opens to the narrator. A very well dressed black person. He speaks as professionally as possible somewhat like rod serling but without reminding the audience of rod serling who of course teaches science fiction).
Today we are going to use provable facts to show you America's greatest murder culture. A culture that you have probably never heard of. It has no name and at the time of the making of this movie there are no documentaries explaining this culture other than this movie. Yet is responsible for literally thousands of murders of black people. By the end you will see that this movie is the scoop of the century. We will be introducing America to its greatest murder culture.
To understand why you've never heard of it please allow me to give you 5 minutes of History.
Before there were white or black people in the United States there were the Kelts who lived in the British isles. Their mainstream culture was fine: bagpipes and leprechauns. But there was a small subculture that practiced the following three things.
A language of:
Threatening violence over trivial things. This is the trait by which the culture is identified.
Streams of psychologically wounding talk for no apparent reason.
Communicating by accusation .
2. Teaching children that hard work and school are not cool. But crime and especially murder is cool.
3. The men making babies from multiple women then not raising them to be good citizens.
(These concepts are written down and displayed professionally whenever there is narration throughout the movie).
3. The English did not have this culture. When they took over the Keltic lands they instituted rule of law and started throwing people in jail for doing these harmful things. The members of this white crime subculture saw that their culture was being attacked and they wanted to move away. Luckily, new lands free from authority had just opened up in a place called Virginia. Their racial and cultural descendants live in the American South today and you will see them later on in this video.
Being lazy, they gravitated toward getting jobs teaching English to immigrants. The immigrants were Africans who were enslaved and the main part of their job was to whip them until they did agricultural work for free. But as they were teaching them English they taught them their white crime culture. Most black people are not part of this subculture. The mainstream black culture is fine. But this white crime culture lived on in a small group of the black community for centuries. Then it made their own music for this Keltic, white, crime, culture. They called it gangsta rap. Yes, gangsta rap is based on this white crime culture.
So to this day the three principles of this ancient Keltic white crime culture live on in America's black neighborhoods.
(Show the written principles again. Then read them out loud again.)
.
If you were to spend years in these neighborhoods like the original author has you will notice two things.
The majority of the residents are high character people that are great to have as coworkers, friends, and spouses. These are black people. This is the mainstream black culture. They, are the heroes of this story.
Our heroes are wildly oppressed by a tiny group of people who are part of this ancient Keltic white crime culture.
You will meet them and be amazed that anyone could act that way white or black. We will now play you videos of both the white and black versions of this same culture.
The first one is a member of the white crime culture who is also a racial descendant of them so he is also white. If you spend time in the states near Virginia you will find more of them. The second one is a member of the white crime culture who lives in an inner city black neighborhood. Please notice the similarities. These similarities can only exist because they have a common ancestor: the ancient Kelts. Warning. Be advised that these videos, for some of you will be the most psychologically abusive talk you have ever heard.
(Play video one. It will be a white, southern, guy who talks like he's in a gangster rap video but without cool music.)
Now we will replay it with explanations
(Replay it stopping each time the guy covers one of the three principles. Ideally, the video will be of somebody who we are interviewing and we give them questions to deliberately get them to describe their culture. Ideally covering all three principles of it.)
As you can see the man in the video is displaying the ancient, Keltic, white, crime culture, that we have been explaining to you. Now we will play for you video two.
(Play video 2. This will be a video of a black guy who speaks like he's trapped in a gangster rap video but with no cool music. Our interviewer will guide him toward saying the things that reveal that he follows the three principles. Then exactly as before replay it again stopping every time they describe one of the principles of this culture and explain it if necessary).
There's more to the script but of course it won't fit in this box.
Professor Glenn I am with you 100% And I strongly advocate we work together. luv1st9@gmail.com
The culture that causes all of these problems is an ancient white culture that comes from Ireland and scotland. Only a tiny amount of black people are really hardcore members of this subculture. So it's not race it's culture. In fact a white culture. This is the key to getting America's acceptance. We're never going to get mainstream media to criticize a group that teaches children to murder people as long as BLM is able to paint them as an oppressed people group meaning black. Teach America that this is a white culture and then we can get society to verbally attack this culture and actively teach children how terrible it is.
This can be done by a movie. Get these Keltic/gangsta types on tape talking about how great murder is and how terrible hard work and school is. But first find their white counterparts in Appalachia, the people previously known as hillbillies. Some of them talk extremely similar to gangsta. While actually hating black people of course. These are the cultural and racial descendants of the ancient Kelts. Once we show the connection between the two we can sell America on the fact that this white murder culture needs to be criticized at Max not hidden as it currently is. I'm sending you in my next message a free script anyone can make the movie, win awards, keep the money. I'm always available for rewrites.
What constitutes "intellectual"? I like the Two Cultures Essay by C. P. Snow from the 1950s. To me it seems that we live in a world of pseudo-intellectual B.S. with endless arguments about words. Maybe McWhorter knows about The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase.
Ultimately the history of the last 500 years comes down to who had technology vs who didn't. So now the people who had the technology now have the land so we have to work for them to get the money to pay them to live on it. Still the same economic power game.
Why don't we create a KURRL, K-12 Unschooling Recommended Reading List? The majority of books are mediocre to crap, there is no way to fix all of these schools. There is no agreement about what and how to fix them. I don't believe most educators want to use the technology well anyway. It might reduce the employment of too many intellectuals.
The Screwing of the Average Man by David Hapgood
Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics by Stan Gibilisco
Most discussion of race is boring at best, the Laws of Physics that most technologies depend on do not care.
You gentlemen have performed an incalculable service to us all during a period--I'm talking about the last several years--when intellectual and ethical bravery was in very short supply. I've come to appreciate not just the space that the two of you hold down, but the moments when your views diverge, or surge with unexpected emotion. The dialogic space is cozy, sometimes, but then Dr. Loury steelmans a progressive claim--"Wait a minute, John. What would you say to somebody who argues that.....?" And John listens, volleys, thinks it through and occasionally revises on an as-needed basis. All the while, you're collectively modeling a kind of long-form inquiry that seems imperiled by the hot takes of social media and the cancel culture it feeds. I'm schooled in multiple ways every time you gentlemen get together, not least because you've been tag-teaming like this for a good long while and engaging deeply with earlier variants of these issues for even longer. So great that this recognition is happening now. Keep the faith!
Thank you Prof Loury for introducing us to the work of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's "Spiral of Silence" theory in your tribute article to John McWhorter. It provided an interesting context as to why false narratives are so pervasive among the woke contingency and its affect on those that do not share their point of view.
I can't begin to thank you and John enough for successfullly penetrating the cloud of woke smoke over the years with all of your thoughtful, passionate, knowledge delivered with the masterful precision of an intellectual olympian which has helped so many of us to breathe.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Spiral of silence - echoes of Arend's en mass not thinking for oneself and squashing the moral intuition that what is morally wrong remains so even if it is legally justified (which is what, in effect, the Nazis effected - but not saying 'this is fascism' - but authoritarian, yes.)
“Though overt censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat arises from the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech that creates a spiral of silence. As John Stuart Mill recognized in his masterwork, On Liberty, it is not the iron fist of state repression but rather the velvet glove of society’s seduction that constitutes the real problem.”
Thank you for this, one of the most eloquent and insightful passages I have read on any topic this year.
This is so brilliant and courageous !
Thank you, Professor Loury, and JFBT.
Spiral of silence -- a powerful insight that deserves careful pondering.... As I watch the socio/political discourse degenerate, the example that this article provides (and JFBT at large) is very compelling. Keep up the good work! But, dare I say, step on the gas? There is so much at stake!
Thanks John, Glenn and JFBT.
Succinctly stated. True. John McWhorter and Professor Loury have advanced a holistic lens on this topic to counter the liberal penchant to presume the right to speak on this topic narrowly for the outcome of increased democratic political power. Thank you!
Economics! I asked a PhD economist from the University of Chicago to explain how an automobile engine worked. He couldn't even start. What has planned obsolescence had to do with economics since Sputnik? We hear GDP all of the time, NDP not so much. But the NDP equation does not take the depreciation of durable consumer goods and therefore planned obsolescence into account.
The last 500 years of history is the result of who had technology vs who didn't. Black Americans place too much emphasis on race instead of sci/tech. Oh yeah, reading a book is "acting white". Were the Japanese acting white when they bombed Pearl Harbor? Try:
Black Man's Burden & Border, Breed nor Birth by Mack Reynolds
They are free in Project Gutenberg.
Thank You to Professors Loury and McWhorter. Can't thank You two enough. (And commenters here.)
BLM movie 10/22
(The screen opens to the narrator. A very well dressed black person. He speaks as professionally as possible somewhat like rod serling but without reminding the audience of rod serling who of course teaches science fiction).
Today we are going to use provable facts to show you America's greatest murder culture. A culture that you have probably never heard of. It has no name and at the time of the making of this movie there are no documentaries explaining this culture other than this movie. Yet is responsible for literally thousands of murders of black people. By the end you will see that this movie is the scoop of the century. We will be introducing America to its greatest murder culture.
To understand why you've never heard of it please allow me to give you 5 minutes of History.
Before there were white or black people in the United States there were the Kelts who lived in the British isles. Their mainstream culture was fine: bagpipes and leprechauns. But there was a small subculture that practiced the following three things.
A language of:
Threatening violence over trivial things. This is the trait by which the culture is identified.
Streams of psychologically wounding talk for no apparent reason.
Communicating by accusation .
2. Teaching children that hard work and school are not cool. But crime and especially murder is cool.
3. The men making babies from multiple women then not raising them to be good citizens.
(These concepts are written down and displayed professionally whenever there is narration throughout the movie).
3. The English did not have this culture. When they took over the Keltic lands they instituted rule of law and started throwing people in jail for doing these harmful things. The members of this white crime subculture saw that their culture was being attacked and they wanted to move away. Luckily, new lands free from authority had just opened up in a place called Virginia. Their racial and cultural descendants live in the American South today and you will see them later on in this video.
Being lazy, they gravitated toward getting jobs teaching English to immigrants. The immigrants were Africans who were enslaved and the main part of their job was to whip them until they did agricultural work for free. But as they were teaching them English they taught them their white crime culture. Most black people are not part of this subculture. The mainstream black culture is fine. But this white crime culture lived on in a small group of the black community for centuries. Then it made their own music for this Keltic, white, crime, culture. They called it gangsta rap. Yes, gangsta rap is based on this white crime culture.
So to this day the three principles of this ancient Keltic white crime culture live on in America's black neighborhoods.
(Show the written principles again. Then read them out loud again.)
.
If you were to spend years in these neighborhoods like the original author has you will notice two things.
The majority of the residents are high character people that are great to have as coworkers, friends, and spouses. These are black people. This is the mainstream black culture. They, are the heroes of this story.
Our heroes are wildly oppressed by a tiny group of people who are part of this ancient Keltic white crime culture.
You will meet them and be amazed that anyone could act that way white or black. We will now play you videos of both the white and black versions of this same culture.
The first one is a member of the white crime culture who is also a racial descendant of them so he is also white. If you spend time in the states near Virginia you will find more of them. The second one is a member of the white crime culture who lives in an inner city black neighborhood. Please notice the similarities. These similarities can only exist because they have a common ancestor: the ancient Kelts. Warning. Be advised that these videos, for some of you will be the most psychologically abusive talk you have ever heard.
(Play video one. It will be a white, southern, guy who talks like he's in a gangster rap video but without cool music.)
Now we will replay it with explanations
(Replay it stopping each time the guy covers one of the three principles. Ideally, the video will be of somebody who we are interviewing and we give them questions to deliberately get them to describe their culture. Ideally covering all three principles of it.)
As you can see the man in the video is displaying the ancient, Keltic, white, crime culture, that we have been explaining to you. Now we will play for you video two.
(Play video 2. This will be a video of a black guy who speaks like he's trapped in a gangster rap video but with no cool music. Our interviewer will guide him toward saying the things that reveal that he follows the three principles. Then exactly as before replay it again stopping every time they describe one of the principles of this culture and explain it if necessary).
There's more to the script but of course it won't fit in this box.
Professor Glenn I am with you 100% And I strongly advocate we work together. luv1st9@gmail.com
The culture that causes all of these problems is an ancient white culture that comes from Ireland and scotland. Only a tiny amount of black people are really hardcore members of this subculture. So it's not race it's culture. In fact a white culture. This is the key to getting America's acceptance. We're never going to get mainstream media to criticize a group that teaches children to murder people as long as BLM is able to paint them as an oppressed people group meaning black. Teach America that this is a white culture and then we can get society to verbally attack this culture and actively teach children how terrible it is.
This can be done by a movie. Get these Keltic/gangsta types on tape talking about how great murder is and how terrible hard work and school is. But first find their white counterparts in Appalachia, the people previously known as hillbillies. Some of them talk extremely similar to gangsta. While actually hating black people of course. These are the cultural and racial descendants of the ancient Kelts. Once we show the connection between the two we can sell America on the fact that this white murder culture needs to be criticized at Max not hidden as it currently is. I'm sending you in my next message a free script anyone can make the movie, win awards, keep the money. I'm always available for rewrites.
What constitutes "intellectual"? I like the Two Cultures Essay by C. P. Snow from the 1950s. To me it seems that we live in a world of pseudo-intellectual B.S. with endless arguments about words. Maybe McWhorter knows about The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase.
Ultimately the history of the last 500 years comes down to who had technology vs who didn't. So now the people who had the technology now have the land so we have to work for them to get the money to pay them to live on it. Still the same economic power game.
http://blog.lostsoulscorp.com/articles/economic-wargames/
Why don't we create a KURRL, K-12 Unschooling Recommended Reading List? The majority of books are mediocre to crap, there is no way to fix all of these schools. There is no agreement about what and how to fix them. I don't believe most educators want to use the technology well anyway. It might reduce the employment of too many intellectuals.
The Screwing of the Average Man by David Hapgood
Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics by Stan Gibilisco
Most discussion of race is boring at best, the Laws of Physics that most technologies depend on do not care.