August 1, 2020

Systemic racism at TikTok?


Problems with TikTok may be so yesterday, because today is the day Trump said he was banning TikTok. Interesting to see him getting ahead of The Woke, who were coming for TikTok anyway.

Keep an eye on James Lindsay. He's the author of that excellent essay "No, the Woke Won’t Debate You. Here’s Why" that we were talking about yesterday, here. He's got a book coming out, "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody," which is going to be a big deal. And look at the high-level attention he's getting:

33 comments:

rehajm said...

He's got a book coming out...which is going to be a big deal

I hope it means a shift away from wokeness but it likely means James Lindsay hiding like Salman Rushdie.

Tacitus said...

"Repent, Tick Tock Man, said the Harlequin".

with apologies to Harlan Ellison

MayBee said...

First, I wouldn't put it past a Chinese company to be racist. I mean, come on.

But also....supposedly this is about algorithms, right? I don't know how an algorithm knows what race you are. There's a similar thing that has been happening in online knitting life the past few years. You've written about some of it. But the idea is that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color. Not sure why that's the breakout) people don't have enough visibility in the knitting world. But the thing is.....the products- yarn, patterns- speak for themselves. I have no idea what color any of the people who design my patterns or the yarns are! On Ravelry, the pictures are of the products. On Instagram, the pictures are of the products. Yet somehow there is still racism built into knitting. I'm told. Over and over again.

Temujin said...

Wow. It's almost as if TikTok treats Black people like Twitter, Google, Facebook, universities, Hollywood, and the entire media complex treats Conservatives.

Dave Begley said...

A former Creighton basketball player posted on Twitter that this Tik Tok ban is this generation's Kristalnacht.

Creighton basketball players are educated!

A US company will jump in and fill the space left by the now banned Tik Tok. Just watch.

traditionalguy said...

Bravo, Andrew Sullivan. Reading that piece will be like a Colonial’s reading of Paine’s Common Sense in 1776.

Birkel said...

Silence is violence sounded so much better in the original Italian.

"Tutto all'interno dello stato, niente al di fuori dello stato, niente contro lo stato."
--Benito Mussolini

mezzrow said...

Might as well go ahead and make yourself a Helen Pluckrose tag as well, Althouse.

I've been drilling down into these guys since the Sokalsquared exposure of the idea-laundering apparatus broke a couple of years ago. This Trojan horse operation to substitute equity for equality and Critical Theory for Critical Thinking is at the heart of what is driving the insanity we see in academia and on the streets today. When understood by the public, particularly for its adoption as dogma by most Education schools, this could bring Evergreen level madness to a middle school near you.

After what we've seen so far, tell me I exaggerate. We'll be struggling with this and ignoring the opportunity cost of dealing with madness instead of actually educating the people who will be running the future, just when the Chinese unleash whatever it is they have cooked up to bring down western civilization. The bringing down western civilization part is where their interests align with those behind Critical Theory and its application.

The power struggle between the Chinese and the Theorists will be brief and final. My money's not on the Theorists.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

blacks are attention whores. And also just regular whores.

Fernandinande said...

Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian had some fake papers published in grievance studies journals; an excerpt from their paper on the rape culture of dog parks:

"Dog parks are microcosms where hegemonic masculinist norms governing queering behavior and compulsory heterosexuality can be observed in a cross-species environment."

They were accused of sociological research malpractice in the form of mistreating the subjects of their study, the mistreated subjects being the dopes who published their fake papers.

Fernandinande said...

I don't know how an algorithm knows what race you are.

Of course the complaints are baseless. Just as my personal Newspeak dictionary translates "trans [woman]" to "not [woman]", it translates "systemic" to "imaginary".

WK said...

James Lindsay was on the Joe Rogan podcast in early July. It was an interesting interview. He posts pretty aggressively on twitter. Decent sense of humor an does not back down....

~ Gordon Pasha said...

Michael Walsh has been writing about the deleterious effect of the Frankfurt School for over a decade. Start with his The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and then on to his other works.

https://www.amazon.com/Devils-Pleasure-Palace-Critical-Subversion/dp/1594039275

MD Greene said...

We need people like Lindsay, Pluckrose and Sullivan now. Most people living normal lives and outside the echo chambers of universities and self-trivializing outfits like the NYT have no idea how distorted and anti-liberal their notions of reality have become.

Say it loud: The emperor has no clothes.

Joe Smith said...

Trump certainly wasn't coming after Tik Tok from any 'woke' angle. It is all about security.

It is not ideal to have that much video data (along with everything that's being stolen off of phones in the background) being streamed to servers easily accessed by the Chinese commies. Especially with their penchant for deploying facial recognition software.

Trump's problem will be banning it and not coming off as the Luddite, mean father or uncle and pissing off all of the adolescent users (and adolescent adults) who are addicted to it.

Hey Skipper said...

Just pre-ordered “Cynical Theories”

Caroline said...

Reading Lindsay’s article, that’s going to be a tough sell for scrolling, flickering minds.

charis said...

I read Sullivan's essay on wokeness. He is way too optimistic that liberal and woke can coexist. Pretty sure the sheep will be eaten by the wolves there. Seems to be already happening.

n.n said...

The Chinese, not as a bloc, but separable along the numerous ethic, tribal divisions, are well known to favor diversity dogma not limited to racial judgments. Notably, one-child (i.e. Pro-Choice) that favored the male over female sex. They have always been progressive in the modern sense.

BarrySanders20 said...

Nice sign in the photo.

A fat leftist probable lesbian was out on the corner yesterday with a "Silence is Violence" sign. If I had nothing better to do I might have created my own sign that said "No It Isn't" and stood next to her.

The "Silence is Violence" concept is interesting when other leftists say that speech is violence. If speech they dont like is violence and silence is violence that only leaves compelled words and speech that leftists agree with as safe and non-violent.

This concept of violence is funny also when viewed against the rioting. I heard the earnest NPR news reporter covering the Portland riots state "I would argue that destruction of property is not violence." The straight news guy says "he would argue" this yet wants to be taken seriously that the rest of the report is the whole truth.

No thanks, leftists.

daskol said...

Pluckrose is also interesting: very progressive, was a part of that calculated grievance study hoax because despite her sympathy for weirdos, she's got a strong sense of intellectual honesty. I hope these are the vessels to transmit this message to the youth, because I sure am not.

daskol said...

Michael Walsh is good, but he's not going to appeal to people enamored of or even afraid of woke culture.

bonkti said...

I know that conservatives in faculties are rare birds but, as long as they are present, doesn't that mean that critical theorists are sharing platforms? I see, now, that white leftists are just as much the teaspoon of poo in the ice cream as conservatives. The true woke must quit the faculty of the university, which is nothing but the master's house.

But that seems logical and therefore must be wrong. Can someone help me?

bonkti said...

BarrySanders 20 said,

"A fat leftist probable lesbian was out on the corner yesterday with a 'Silence is Violence sign. If I had nothing better to do I might have created my own sign that said 'No It Isn't' and stood next to her."

I'd stand next to you with: "Disagreement is Violence".

Clark said...

I stumbled on a Youtube video of a Pluckrose lecture on Postmodernism. It was very good. Keep an eye on her. She was nervous at the podium, but that did not get in the way of a very good lecture.

Kelly said...

Somehow I get mostly black people on my TikTok for you page. Maybe because I follow many black conservatives. I also follow a black trans conservative, gay conservatives and I get anything corresponding to that. That’s how TikTok works. It goes by your interests. Not that I’m gay, black or trans, but since I showed an interest, that’s what shows up. My daughter gets dancing TikTokers and cooking videos on her for you page because that’s what she’s shown an interest in.

MountainMan said...

Thanks for the reference to "New Discourses". Have not seen it before. A number of excellent pieces on that site. I have already shared it with some of my close friends. Also noted that James Lindsay has several podcasts with Joe Rogan. Think I'll spend much of the afternoon listening to those.

One of my favorite things about this blog is when it points me to significant new information.

ALP said...

I read the Lindsay essay last night - why the Woke will not debate. Fantastic read and well worth the time. Confirms that political activism is a substitute for religion. The Woke don't debate for the same reasons the extremely religious/purist do not: you, the Unbeliever, are "of the world" and just don't have the spiritual component to even grasp/understand enough of Woke thinking to even have a conversation on their level.

Also - the Woke appear to believe we are at the end of knowledge of our species - there is nothing more to learn about us. We know it all. We will never learn another thing about us that will change our thinking.

Jaq said...

“We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”

It’s funny that it’s mostly white people enforcing this “We’ll do the thinking” paradigm. Just like the rioters are mostly all white, or hangers on with whites, though everybody pretends it’s vice versa.

It’s like the old joke about communism “Under capitalism, one man exploits another, under communism it’s the other way around. It’s also funny that they explicitly want to destroy the system of incentives that puts food on the table and makes people want to. come to this country. Once these guys have been in charge long enough, they will finish Trump’s wall to keep Americans in.

ALP said...

Maybee at 7:02:

I was on Ravelry when it first got off the ground. Ventured into "non knitting" forums - they were full of righteous PC anger even then. Not surprized that yarn has been politicized. After all, knitters will have knock down, drag-out fights over the use of synthetic vs. natural yarns.

Jaq said...

"A former Creighton basketball player posted on Twitter that this Tik Tok ban is this generation's Kristalnacht.”

Which is pretty funny at a time when violent rioters are breaking store windows because they don’t like the result of the last election.

ALP said...

I am becoming slightly ashamed of having a sibling in academia - she's part of the problem for sure. Professor of Grievance studies in the California State University system - so I have had a close up view of this development. I got a hint of this about 20 years ago when my sibling was working on her PhD and explained that she never used red ink when correcting papers as it was too "tramautizing" for college students.

Sullivan's article mentioning how popular these academic programs have become over time, I am also reminded of a conversation I had with her years back when she began working as a real professor in Los Angeles. Many of her students, she explained, were the first in their families to attend college to get a degree. I figured she was referring to students taking sociology as an *elective* while pursuing practical degrees in engineering, nursing or accounting.

Nope. First generation to go to college - degree in grievance studies. To me this is nothing more than really, really, really, REALLY expensive therapy/journey of self discovery. How awful to be the first to get a degree, only to end up in debt and working for $15 an hour.

5M - Eckstine said...

I'm sure its just me but for some reason I can't visually read that page without pain. The black background with the white Times Roman font. It's either too rich or too poor. I don't know.