John McWhorter: The Neoracists • Hacker News Board

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#11

Post by minikites » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #8

lisper wrote: post #2

It is important to note that this article was written by a black man, a contributing editor to The Atlantic. John McWhorter is not a MAGA hack. That being said... This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques. On the other hand, a fair number of people (including myself) subscribe to the position that, although things are not nearly as bad as they have b…

Surely statistics might help us resolve to what extent things like public torture and killing of black people by authorities is a problem (as distinct from police brutality against all people generally). What do the statistics say? Edit: This comment went from +7 to -1 in a matter of a page refresh. HN should be cognizant of brigading on threads like this. But moreso, the people doing it should also ask themselves wh…

What leads you to believe the statistics are gathered and reported accurately?

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#12

Post by JIBitator » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

When I read Hacker News I want to see inspiring articles about tech, not these puerile, low-T debates about "racism in America". God, I'm glad I'm not American. What a pathetic country it has become really. I can smell its stench from the other side of the Atlantic.

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#13

Post by beaner » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #11

beaner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely statistics might help us resolve to what extent things like public torture and killing of black people by authorities is a problem (as distinct from police brutality against all people generally). What do the statistics say? Edit: This comment went from +7 to -1 in a matter of a page refresh. HN should be cognizant of brigading on threads like this. But moreso, the people doing it should also ask themselves wh…

What leads you to believe the statistics are gathered and reported accurately?

Literal death does not tend to be misreported in the first world.

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#14

Post by stevenwoo » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #2

It is important to note that this article was written by a black man, a contributing editor to The Atlantic. John McWhorter is not a MAGA hack. That being said... This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques. On the other hand, a fair number of people (including myself) subscribe to the position that, although things are not nearly as bad as they have b…

His arguments read exactly the same as Clarence Thomas’ on race and African Americans - to paraphrase a recent biography “that life is too easy for them and we are coddling them”.

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#15

Post by newacct583 » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #2

It is important to note that this article was written by a black man, a contributing editor to The Atlantic. John McWhorter is not a MAGA hack. That being said... This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques. On the other hand, a fair number of people (including myself) subscribe to the position that, although things are not nearly as bad as they have b…

I think that's about right. And there's a more market-based take on this: McWhorter politics audience is swelling at the moment and he's trying to take advantage. There are a lot of broadly intellectual para-conservatives right now feeling cast out of the conventional conservative media environment (occupied as it is with fighting a civil war between the MAGA insurgents and traditional republicans). This site, in particular, is absolutely filled with them.

And a message like this, aimed squarely at the woke left and requiring no compromise on the part of a conservative reader, is pure mana for that audience. The Greenwald essay that spiked here (briefly) yesterday is in the same genre.

Basically: straw men arguments aimed at the seemingly ascendant left are going to be big business around here for the next few years.

[1] To be fair: he's also a professional linguist with a real day job as a professor at Columbia. Go find and read his Power of Babel book at some point, it's great.

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#16

Post by minikites » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

JIBitator wrote: post #12

When I read Hacker News I want to see inspiring articles about tech, not these puerile, low-T debates about "racism in America". God, I'm glad I'm not American. What a pathetic country it has become really. I can smell its stench from the other side of the Atlantic.

Low T? What is that?

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#17

Post by klmadfejno » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #13

minikites wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What leads you to believe the statistics are gathered and reported accurately?

Literal death does not tend to be misreported in the first world.

I'd imagine there's a large number of things missing from the record though

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#18

Post by e40 » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #13

minikites wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What leads you to believe the statistics are gathered and reported accurately?

Literal death does not tend to be misreported in the first world.

It has been widely reported that causes due to police interactions are not tracked on a national level.

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#19

Post by peytn » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #2

It is important to note that this article was written by a black man, a contributing editor to The Atlantic. John McWhorter is not a MAGA hack. That being said... This article is the very definition of a straw man. Absolutely no one subscribes to the position it critiques. On the other hand, a fair number of people (including myself) subscribe to the position that, although things are not nearly as bad as they have b…

> But we have not yet solved fully solved it, and anyone who says that we have, particularly when they say it in such a condescending way, is part of the problem.

I just finished reading this article in its entirety, and I think I might’ve missed this part. My impression was that the author is describing a proselytizing ideology that happens to be based on skin color and draws legitimacy from historical perfidies. Actual progress on racism seemed to me to be orthogonal to what the author was talking about.

Re: John McWhorter: The Neoracists

#20

Post by roywiggins » Tue, Feb 09, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #13

minikites wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What leads you to believe the statistics are gathered and reported accurately?

Literal death does not tend to be misreported in the first world.

It's quite hard to come up with reliable statistics for police killings in the US. It's not that deaths aren't counted, it's that they're misclassified.

> Feldman used data from the Guardian’s 2015 investigation into police killings, The Counted, and compared it with data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). That dataset, which is kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was found to have misclassified 55.2% of all police killings, with the errors occurring disproportionately in low-income jurisdictions.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/11/police-killi...