#no antiblack slurs as far as i can tell
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Ok Andrew Rindfleisch is kind of absolutely iconic he's an American modern classical composer and his wind orchestra pieces slap but then on his spotify there's this one song called "Conervatives United" which is just him making fun of conservatives it's so fucking fun
#i mean it's very much a strawman but i still have fun with it#I should also definitely warn before you go listen to it#there's lots of slurs#like#f slur is used many times#no antiblack slurs as far as i can tell#but definitely antiasian
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FYI this has been going on— (cw for screenshots from a racist rightwing blog)
[image IDs: several screenshots from a blog post by Noah Carl, a rightwing “researcher” of racial pseudoscience, regarding “Nick Bostrom’s pre-emptive apology”
2nd screenshot of Carl’s statement shown above:
Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at Oxford who works on topics like existential risk and human enhancement. I haven’t read much of his work, but people I respect rate it very highly. Anatoly Karlin (whom I had on the podcast recently) considers him “the greatest living philosopher”.
A few days ago, Bostrom posted a document titled ‘Apology for An Old Email’ on his website. The document was subsequently shared on Twitter by his colleague Anders Sandberg, apparently at Bostrom’s request. It begins:
> I have caught wind that somebody has been digging through the archives of the Extropians listserv with a view towards finding embarrassing materials to disseminate about people … I fear that selected pieces of the most offensive stuff will be extracted, maliciously framed and interpreted, and used in smear campaigns. To get ahead of this, I want to clean out my own closet, and get rid of the very worst of the worst in my contribution file.
The email in question, which was sent “in the mid 90s” as part of a discussion about “offensive communication styles”, is as follows:
> I have always liked the uncompromisingly objective way of thinking and speaking: the more counterintuitive and repugnant a formulation, the more it appeals to me given that it is logically correct. Take for example the following sentence:
> Blacks are more stupid than whites.
[I cut off the rest of Carl’s screenshot of Bostrom’s email, as it contained more unpleasant antiblack commentary]
3rd screenshot:
You don’t have to apologise for saying offensive things in a setting that people have selected into for the specific purposes of discussing offensive things. Stand-up comedians don’t need to apologise for telling jokes at their shows that it would inappropriate for them to tell in church. Moreover, Bostrom made the comments more than twenty years ago, and he “immediately apologised” at the time! End of story.
Yet as you well know, academia is crawling with offence archaeologists – low-lifes who spend their time combing through other people’s writing with the hope of finding something they can use to ruin their careers. They are not virtuous, and they do not care about the downtrodden. Their aim is simply to “take down” someone whose views they disapprove of – usually someone who contributes far more to society than they do.
In light of this, you can understand why Bostrom wanted to “get ahead” of the controversy by saying his piece pre-emptively. Unfortunately, what he said may have made things worse – not only for himself but for others who might find themselves in similar situations in the future.
4th:
Rather than making the points I made above (and perhaps apologising for needing to bring the admittedly provocative email to people’s attention), he issued an embarrassingly grovelling apology:
> I completely repudiate this disgusting email from 26 years ago … The invocation of a racial slur was repulsive. I immediately apologized for writing it at the time … and I apologize again unreservedly today. I recoil when I read it and reject it utterly.
As for his “actual views”, Bostrom thinks “it is deeply unfair that unequal access to education, nutrients, and basic healthcare leads to inequality in social outcomes, including sometimes disparities in skills and cognitive capacity”. And he wants you to know that he has given to charities “fighting exactly this problem”, including “the Black Health Alliance”.
The one saving grace of his apology – from the perspective of grown-up intellectual discourse – was that he didn’t denounce the hypothesis that genes contribute to group differences in cognitive ability. “It is not my area of expertise”, he wrote, “and I don’t have any particular interest in the question.” Note: the latter claim is likely to be false; how could you not be interested in it?
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https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1615072322058076166
[image ID:
tweet by xriskology:
The real victimhood culture is on the political right:
[a screenshot from the same Noah Carl blog post shown above]
thread QRTing their tweet:
“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”
My line is that your career can be destroyed by exposing the truth (that you’re still soft on vapid racial pseudoscience 25 years after endorsing it), then it deserves to be.
I find it deeply disgusting and infuriating the way that so many “rationalists” are framing everything in terms of “he said a bad word and immediately apologized 25 years ago” when that’s not even fucking remotely the issue and would amount to almost no blowback on its own.
I think almost no one gives a shit about Bostrom using the n-word 25 years ago, his apology for that isn’t the issue. The issue is that his recent apology is stunning in what it studiously doesn’t renounce and the way it leaves claims about genetic racial intelligence open.
I’m well aware that Bostrom makes the perfectly fine transhumanist move that “even if racial intelligence disparities were a thing, they’re irrelevant because everyone can individually tinker with themselves in whatever direction” but it’s not enough to merely bracket the claims.
Bostrom’s “apology” sounds perfectly fine to him and his circles because “I am not an expert on racial science” sounds like a renunciation of his claim “blacks are stupider than whites” to them. But it’s anything but! It doesn’t address at all what he still believes.
The fact is that the specific measures the rationalist community chooses to valorize, certain limited performances of rationality, do not exclude shitbags willing to make some contortions so those shitbags flock into their circles, expelling others, and shaping background norms.
I’d be willing to bet at sharp odds that >50% of the self-identified rationalist community believes “there are significant genetic racial disparities in intelligence between the races and unfairly we can’t talk about this.”
That is the problem Bostrom’s non-apology exemplifies
Now there are myriad good mechanisms and reasons to dismiss the object-level claim, but sure, ghosts could exist and it could be true, the biggest problem is the way this “likelihood” has been drastically inflated within the rationalist community by their social dynamics.
The rationalist community is running the proverbial bar where they let nazis in. And if you fail to draw the line with one nazi, you very rapidly just have a nazi bar. Because nazis are large in number, have few other options, and are willing to go through a lot of contortions.
Nazis will absolutely shit themselves silly writing endless papers throwing chaff everywhere like the “200 proofs the earth is not flat” and credulous “rationalist” bros whose whole self-image prioritizes feeling smarter than everyone and holders of esoteric truths love that.
And so we see vast asymmetries and distortions in the epistemic frames of most “rationalists” as a consequence of their sociological dynamics. They proactively read anti-woke folks on the right and then pretty much never delve deep into radical leftist arguments.
They’ll delve into the most esoteric neoreactionary screeds with giant bibliographies of catholic and postmodern writers to find the secret actual argument for an inane conservative position, but then assume every leftist argument is the first related tumblr post they found.
Scott Alexander Siskind BRAGGED that his readership was fair and balanced because he had some socialists and only like 22% identified openly as alt-right or neoreactionary. That is not balance. That is a nazi bar. And that social fabric warps one’s epistemology.
Bostrom honestly thought he was addressing the problem with his racist email in the 90s. And Sandberg (god damnit dude) read it and was like “this is a knockout response I want to be associated with” and hordes of fuckers saw the same.
reply to the thread by zorangecats:
One observation I’ve made is I’ve never seen the rationalist “steelman” for the feminist worldview. An interesting omission.
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https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1614428504581607424
[image ID:
tweet by Aella_Girl:
Lost some respect for EA due to the response to the Bostrom thing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised? CEA has always leaned a bit too far towards PR at the expense of integrity. I guess I’d hoped to see some more bravery. Feel like the correct response would have had more nuance.
thread QRTing her tweet:
The lost “integrity” she’s bemoaning is that the Centre for Effective Altruism released a very thin anodyne statement condemning Bostrom’s “words” (presumably just his original email and no detail on whether the racial pseudoscience in particular sucks)
Imagine being so fucking twisted that you see condemning racist shit to any minor degree as a lack of integrity.
These people’s entire morality is about fiercely condemning and ostracizing anyone who ever dabbles in condemning or ostracizing people over shit like racism, rape, and transphobia.
It’s pure Coalition Of The Bad shit.
/end image ID]
#repost of someone else’s content#twitter repost#nick bostrom#racism#antiblackness#antiblackness cw#gillis#Enlightened Centrism#the self-proclaimed ‘rationalist’ community#aella#underdiscussed but important#claiming rationality =/= your calculations are free of error#(or that your formulas are correct in the first place)#(or that you are automatically free of bias or inaccuracy)#aesthetic (but ultimately irrational) posturing masquerading as a takedown of of others’ supposed aesthetic irrationalities#as it always goes -- whites make counterfactual statements & construct theories around them motivated by (yes) *bias*#and pass it off as fact --> any of the marginalized who debunk those inaccuracies & present the facts are labeled as biased ourselves#claiming we debunk bioessentialism & tie that to our egalitarian ideology bc ideology first ‘pseudo’science second#when in fact that it exactly what *they* did and what we do is *to undo what they did first*#however their epistemology also has a built-in self-defense mechanism:#‘if they claim x y z they must be wrong because as our ‘facts’ prove they’re too irrational & stupid to know what’s right#(and their disagreement proves our theories are right)’#same self-reinforcing mechanism fundamental to western colonialism (& patriarchy) in the modern form that claims to be rational/scientific#also how the entire psychiatric field conducts itself (heavy ties to other fields of human biological study esp. neuroscience)#& can successfully hook a lot of ppl already motivated to fall for this kind of stacking the deck#but the (yes) *aesthetic* they present themselves w/ makes it easier for them to deflect criticism#bc ‘I am Objectively Right according to Science --> all those critics are just irrational moralist science-haters’#especially frustrating when many in that crowd *do* promote genuinely suppressed but correct ideas (such as transhumanism)#but then try to lump in things like racism as similarly suppressed unjustly as if the dynamics are anywhere near the same#I wasnt aware abt Bostrom bc Ive been off twitter for months
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I can't tell if he's getting dragged on Twitter and I'm not about to check his tags, but uuuummmm. It's weird how uneven the energy is. He gave an ineloquent answer and ppl are calling him homophobic despite years worth of evidence to the contrary. Calling him slurs and all kinds of other shit. But those same folks either vehemently defended or turned a blind eye to the stuff his white coworkers have done and said.
Far be it for me to dictate how anyone feels, but there's an interesting lack of grace allowed to him vs others. Some of you act like you were just waiting for him to step out of line and that's very strange. And I'm not talking about dunking on the sillier parts of his answer or discussion on WHY the answer came off so bad. I'm talking about ppl actually trying to "cancel" him and hurt his livelihood and taking this chance to air out all that antiblackness they've been stewing in.
The answer he gave was clunky and obviously not well thought-out, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss everything he pointed out that IS true so you feel justified in calling him homophobic or racial slurs.
If his answer upset you then, by all means, feel your feelings, but stop trying to act like it's suddenly his entire personality and that everything he's done and said since before that interview dropped has been erased. Y'all act like you've never had a single instance of unintentional assholery. I wonder if you hold yourselves to that same impossible standard you're holding him. It is fine and valid to feel hurt or taken aback by his answer, but please remember that one shit comment doesn't make him a bad person.
Anyway. Hopefully everyone can cool down and try to understand what he was getting at. Or at least have this same energy across the board.
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giselle lip syncing n word confidently yep shes just like the rest idc what anyone says we don't need to be educating idols about not saying racial slurs in 2021. mind you she is fluent in english, went to an international school and has lived in america. so fucking repulsive.
I never knew she lived in america, as far as I'm aware she lived in Japan her whole life and studied in an international school (which just means they teach immersive English). I'm not going to justify what she did but like, everyone can fuck up. it's not even my place to forgive her or attack her for it since I'm not black. I wish someone could bring this up in a fansign call and tell her why it's wrong the same way they did with lisa but as I said sm deleting the video doesn't help anyone. she should be held accountable and also given the chance to apologize for it but we all know that's not what kpop companies do specially when it comes to antiblackness
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You probably shouldn't be trying to speak for black people
i'm literally just reiterating what i've seen countless black people say. should i not say anything? because it's not being an "ally" to keep your mouth shut when you see people doing things you know are wrong. i've seen it said repeatedly that you should speak up in cases of racism/antiblackness. i did that after assessing the situationi try to be careful but of course i can fuck up. i just feel like that every time i simply tell someone that hey this thing you're doing doesn't seem ok i've seen multiple black people say this, i get an anon saying i'm speaking over black people but when i ask for specifics or why it is wrong to "call out" someone like this, i never get a replythis isn't my own opinion. i didn't say what i said because i decided, in privacy, that la la land is racist. it was heavily discussed for months. white people not calling out other white people is also discussed all the time. as is the idea that you shouldn't expect black people to shoulder everything because you feel like you should never say anything about racismbut in your opinion, i should've left it alone? waited for a black person to see it and have that argument with op + the anon messages i got calling me slurs? maybe i should've sent the link to a random black person to get them to do it? because as far as i know, that's exactly what you should not doat the end of the day, you gotta use your own brain and decide which opinions you will follow, because you can't think that every opinion on every topic is the right one. e.g. i think cishets shouldn't use homophobic slurs but some lgbt people will say it's ok, and cishets who hear both of these opinions will have to decide for themselves, which one they think is the "correct" opinion even if they have no say in lgbt issuesso i will choose to follow what people other than you, highly esteemed anon, have said
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#long post || been thinking about the “period-typical racism” tag on ao3. and tbh im growing mad incredulous at the necessity of adding “period-typical.” like, adding “period-typical” deeply affects how we process, understand, temporarily place, and (at our most extreme) normalize depictions of racism—and for having such an effect, it’s not something i see addressed enough, if ever.
for example, i see this tag almost exclusively used in historical fic, usually in conjunction with overt, sometimes extreme displays of racism, antiblackness, and colorism. i appreciate the warning of racism because sometimes i need pure escapism. and so for that day, not seeing beloved characters of color disrespected will win out over my appreciation for realism and my desire for stories that speak to poc’s entire lived experiences (good, bad, everything in between, and everything outside this spectrum). these are usually the same days i hazard against the risk of coming across insensitive, poorly conceived, near fetishistic attempts at depicting racism just to build up the whump.
but… there’s a strangeness i feel when i see the “period-typical” tag and the racism depicted are acts, slurs, conflicts, and examples of larger structural inequity that can and still does happen today.
like, i read a lot of fics with this tag in marvel featuring historical au sam wilson or canon-aligned howling commandos. this fandom is where i saw the most of the tag being used simply because of the quantity of fic produced, but since then ive noticed it more and more around fandom, from star wars to overwatch. and let me tell you, there’s been so many times ive had to just sit back and question the scene, myself as a consumer of fanfic and of this depiction of racism/antiblackness/colorism, and (perhaps unfairly) the writer. i ask: is “period-typical” used to acknowledge the important specificity of the historical moment depicted; or is it used to distance our current era and (by extension) ourselves from these racist acts?
like, hashtag slur time but honestly. there’s obviously many structural differences between this fictional character in a historical fic calling this other fictional character a spic, and someone calling one of my fam members a spic now… but in the end of the day, that shit is still burns something awful either way. like!!! “period-typical” is sometimes basically used as shorthand for “this fic operates through a world where segregation exists, and this has implications for the black characters in my story” in a lot of the fics ive read. and maybe that’s important use? but… idk, the whole situation feels off to me with how the specific depictions of racism, antiblackness, and colorism in the fic usually draw heavily upon examples of real life oppression from the present. you can just tag segregation, after all, instead of leaving it to the imprecise whims of the “period-typical racism” tag.
relatedly (and this might be heavily based in my own reading bias based on my fandoms and ships): i feel like writers are far more likely to research, explore, and write serious considerations around race, blackness, and color (the kind that would require a “period-typical racism” tag) in historical aus. yet again, allowing temporality (by which i mean, the relationship to time between writer, reader, characters, canon, and the fic) to dictate how comfortable we are with addressing these key issues. and like, saying racism in the past is “period-typical” feels like there’s a subtle recognition of racism working on a society scale; it outright recognizes the depiction in the fic represented as part of a larger moment and larger systems of oppression. but then where does this leave modern aus? does it imply that the racism depicted is not typical of our times? because i assure you: racism, antiblackness, and colorism are alive and well y'all. also, lmao, what in the world would “period-atypical racism” refer to…
tbh i don’t know the answers for the questions im posing, but i have obviously have suspicions. so. how do we address this, then? well, for a fic im writing rn, im challenging myself to confront the peculiarity of what “period-typical” racism means when applied to a modern setting and (in this fic’s case) the future. as i acknowledge in an a/n, tagging a story set in the future as having “period-typical racism” is glib, but i feel doing this is (as i said) a challenge to myself but also an invitation for folks to question how we understand depictions of racism in fiction through time.
just some food for thought (and revolution) for y'all.
note: i use “we/our” throughout to acknowledge that creators of color internalize-then-perpetuate our own oppressions, as well as the oppressions of those across difference, especially for nonblack folk of color against black folk. however, the impetus falls largely on white folks to step up and constantly question how your participation in fandom challenges or perpetuates racism. and, like, also note: this all assumes ppl are actually fucking writing enough fic for your faves of color that you could even have the chance to get into a deeper conversation about the subtle tides of the tags, and lmao we all know the absolute plenitudes of fanwork about poc out right, amiright??
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