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founding

FYI, I found this twitter thread from another FITS alum, Lee Jussim, to be interesting:

https://twitter.com/PsychRabble/status/1438533217506709510?s=19

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Noah Smith writes well, intelligently, but knowingly as an elitist cosmopolitan. Dishonestly.

"when people on the Right insisted that Barack Obama was a Muslim, it was widely understood that his religion was not what was making them uncomfortable."

Most of those against Obama's support of Islam, like his nuke deal with Iran and his snubbing of Israel, are far more uncomfortable with his policies than his color. But Noah is right that EVERY SINGLE criticism of Obama was spun, dishonestly, by his elite bubble as RAAAACISM.

And such racist Democrats came to understand the Power of (the Dark Side) Dishonest Accusations of Racism. So they, with media allies, constantly accuse Reps of racism. Because even a false accusation of racism, like the mostly false one by Noah, is effective.

Yes, there remains a few racists in America, thinking "we" should treat Blacks differently, and worse, because they're Black. No elected Republican is like that.

The power of the label, "racism", has also dominated the morphing of the meaning.

Racism 1: supporting policies that advantage one race over another race.

Racism 2: believing the races are different, and the difference is important.

Racism 3: claiming any area where Blacks are less represented than their US pop percentage is primarily caused by racism.

CRT is hugely #3 - but itself is counter-racist #1.

The IQ racism debate continues, because the facts show heritable differences in IQ, and more Blacks with lower than White average, and more Asians with higher than average.

By #2, reality is racist. True reality, scientific reality - based on testing hypotheses against experimental results. Those results are racist.

This is the reason so many Dems reject reality.

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Sorry, Arnold. Once you decided to include Noah Smith's views in your review, you have to go well beyond the four-line paragraph you have written. It's not a minor issue because the barbarians are fighting for the power of government, and they are ready to do anything to grab it. For a long time, you have tried to frame the fight in your country as a cultural war but you have been ignoring what is going on in other countries where "social outbreaks" happened before the pandemic. The barbarians are happy with enemies that portray them as the main party in a cultural war in which they can argue whatever in their "hostile" encounters with boring intellectuals (a trillion columns on "wokeism" mean nothing to the barbarians).

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While Smith's formulation is overly simplistic, it is inaccurate to claim that "wokeism" as a monolithic cultural movement is the only culture war provocateur (or that there is any ONE such), and also that it is only anti-individualistic. Wokeism is often compared to religion by the super anti-Woke, and just like many religions, it contains within it both individualistic strands and anti-individualistic strands.

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