Bret and Heather 32nd DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: What's Going on in Portland
In this 32nd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com). Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon. Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, lik...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
This is live stream number 32.
Only 10 more to go before we discover the answer to life, the universe, and quite possibly everything.
I'm not sure we have that much time.
I'm not either.
I'm just if.
That's where I'm getting at.
Maybe we should accelerate the pace.
That's not a bad idea.
Yeah, we could try to get to it a little faster.
All right.
So, I am sitting with Dr. Heather Hying, as always, and we are humming along here.
2020 is continuing apace, and we happen to be in Portland, in the center of, well, let's just say, pretty much everything at the moment.
It's the center of a lot of things, anyway.
It does seem to be the center of a lot of things.
So, should we start there?
Let's start there.
All right, so we don't know what you all know, but you have seen Portland trending on Twitter, if you're a Twitter person, and you have recognized that there is something afoot.
So for some... I think it's broken out into the mainstream media as well.
Oh, clearly, clearly awareness of the Portland situation has begun to reach the outer world.
Especially now that the Chazz Chop is gone.
Right.
Portland is where it's happening.
So what we have is a standoff that has continued for, I don't know, something like 54 consecutive nights.
It very quickly began to focus on two federal buildings downtown and basically of late we have seen
Federal agents not dressed in uniform Pulling people out of these riots into what are described as rented and therefore unmarked vehicles taking them to an undisclosed location which appears to be inside one of the federal buildings and in general the reports are that these people are held for a time and And then they are released, often without charge, maybe always without charge.
I did see one instance in which somebody said they were ultimately read their rights, but in other cases they have not been.
So, in our last livestream, my conjecture Was that these were indications that the rioters had triggered?
federal provisions reserved for terrorism that essentially suspend many aspects of the Constitution and that in particular what one should pay attention to the NDAA of 2012 which had two provisions in it essentially allowing Law enforcement to pull people off of any street anytime without explaining what they're doing showing evidence against them Suspending habeas corpus rights and all of that In response to that live stream, we got a comment.
Zach, you want to show that comment?
All right.
As someone familiar with the process, I'd like to provide possible insight into federal pickups.
It's far more likely that the agents are monitoring video surveillance and recordings of vandalism and directing the pickup units who surveil targets away from crowds.
Where I'm sorry, I'm having trouble reading it at this distance.
I can't.
Yeah, you pick it up.
It's far more likely that agents are monitoring video surveillance and recordings of vandalism, and directing the pickup units who surveil targets away from crowds where they pick them up to get positive ID, so that they can present the case to a federal grand jury.
Furthermore, the fact that they are taken into custody without being read Miranda is not unconstitutional.
Miranda is only required prior to interview, not prior to detention." Reads this comment.
So, the officer who I have described talking with in front of one of these federal buildings on his last day as a DHS officer in Portland contacted me in response to that comment and said that it was accurate.
Now, he doesn't know anything about what's going on currently because he's not stationed in Portland and he's not part of that agency anymore.
His point is that when he was in on the planning of what was taking place, this was one of the things that was being contemplated.
And so I'd like to explain what this means.
It does suggest that more than likely the interpretation that I had is at least not the one that the federal government is working from at the on-the-ground level.
Which, just to clarify, means that you said that what we were seeing suggested that the NDAA had been implicitly, at least, invoked, and what we are currently coming to understand suggests that that may not be the case.
Yes.
Now, there is slight ambiguity because when the Obama administration defended the provisions of NDAA, they said that those provisions, shocking as they were, did not actually provide any new powers, suggesting that they already had those powers.
Right.
There's a question about whether or not a special terrorism category has been triggered, especially in light of the fact that the president has used that very term.
This comment, and the fact that a federal officer who was stationed in Portland says that it is an accurate explanation of what was planned when he was here, suggests that something else is afoot.
which is, imagine for a second that somebody is stationed on the roof of one of these buildings, they are watching crimes being committed, for example, vandalism, or projectiles being launched, something like that.
They could then indicate to people on the ground that somebody was in the midst of committing crimes or had been observed committing crimes, but they wouldn't necessarily know who that person is because, of course, people are dressed with masks and other things that obscure their identity.
So a team on the ground would collect individuals, take them to a cell where their identity would be ascertained by some mechanism.
I I don't know what it would be, but let's say facial recognition, or fingerprints, or I don't know what it is.
But nonetheless, that that would then be used to get a grand jury, a federal grand jury, to indict, which is apparently a very different process than takes place when crimes are prosecuted locally.
I must tell you, there's a lot of this that disturbs me.
On the other hand, what I think is missing from the Portland story is the fact that there is no good solution, that we've been left in a terrible bind by the local city officials.
Remember, our mayor, Mayor Wheeler, is also our police commissioner, so he is in a position to play the George Bridges role here in Portland and to frustrate the local police so that they do not act.
This is what we have seen for close to two months now.
With attacks on federal buildings that are obviously quite illegal, that are dealt with basically by an appeasement here locally.
Now because the protesters have chosen federal buildings, there's a whole second layer, which is to say the federal government is not hamstrung by Mayor Wheeler.
So there is a division between what the local police are doing, which is to say very little, because they can't, And what the federal police are doing, which is to say they are now ratcheting up some sort of approach to protect these buildings.
Now, if you're disturbed by the federal approach, you need to ask yourself some questions, which is, why have the protesters chosen these buildings?
Why would they choose federal buildings?
In part the answer is surely because they want a federal crackdown.
Why do they want a federal crackdown?
Because they're very interested in portraying this as some sort of egregious governmental overreach.
When in fact those of us who live in Portland Know that we have a problem.
We have people being violent consistently over many nights who are facing very few restrictions on their behavior and it makes us wonder whether or not violence against us will be tolerated in the same way.
Now, if I can just add one final thing before we discuss this.
I want you to run a thought experiment.
Let's imagine for a second That I, personally, just me, became agitated about governmental corruption.
Which I am.
And let's suppose I decided to do the same thing to these federal buildings that these protesters are doing.
What do you think would happen to me?
I think I'd be arrested.
That's what I think.
And what's more, you can run the same experiment.
These protests happen every night.
Hundreds to thousands of people show up.
And you can just ask the question, suppose I were to approach the building during the day.
Don't you think it's likely I would be arrested for attacking these buildings?
I feel certain of it.
I feel certain I wouldn't get away with it.
That there's something about these crowds of individuals that are not triggering the same response to law breaking as I would.
And initially you could argue that this has something to do with the number of people.
That basically a proper law enforcement response was not easy to manage in the early days.
But that surely is not the case months down the road, right?
Certainly there are tactics, there are things we do when lots of people decide to break the law together, even if they initially overwhelm the system.
Once you realize that that's happening, you bring in more resources from elsewhere if need be.
You come up with tactics and you enforce the law.
So the result of this thought experiment, I think, is that it is what the people attacking these buildings are saying, what they represent, that is causing them to be allowed to violate the law.
And others of us, who might have very legitimate complaints about the way the federal government runs, would not be given the same leeway.
I think this paints a very difficult puzzle and what I would like to know from people who see this as somehow a positive thing is what exactly it is that they are envisioning.
There's no demand that could be met here.
Should the protesters be allowed to burn down federal buildings in the heart of Portland?
Is that what is being said?
Because the protesters say, look, You know, and they spray paint this on the buildings.
They say property damage is not violence.
So basically their sense is that they have a right to attack these buildings.
The city government tacitly agrees with that.
The federal government disagrees.
It is its obligation to disagree.
And the people of the city of Portland are caught in the middle.
You have anything on this topic that you want to add?
Yeah, I mean there's a lot to say.
One thing that I know just a little bit about that I'm not sure that I want to add to the story here is that apparently, I think it's City Commissioner Hardesty, who is as leftist as they get on the, I think it's the Portland City Council, I'm not totally sure what her position is,
...has been decrying how ineffective Wheeler has been, basically arguing that he has overseen this brutal police force that has been hurting people, and so is trying to wrest control of the police force away from him.
And what she has in her position at the moment somehow is control over the Portland Police Bureau.
And a couple of days ago the Portland Police Bureau – I didn't prepare any of this, I don't have all of my details here – but the Portland Police Bureau that has 18 or 20 sites around the city, as you would expect they would, put out a statement saying, not now, not ever will we allow staging by either Portland City Police or the federal officers to work from where we are.
Now, the idea that the two essential city services are, A, overseen by two different officials is a little surprising to me.
You know, why if the mayor is the police commissioner, why isn't he also in control of the firemen?
So you meant fire bureau or police bureau?
Wheeler is control of the police.
Yeah.
But you said... Why isn't he in control of fire?
Right.
And so it's the fire bureau that has forbidden the shared access of the federal officers.
But also by the police.
This is the point.
The local fire department has declared itself unwilling to, and has said that it never has, allowed staging, tactics, strategy, anything by local police.
Also federal officers, but just put that aside for the moment.
It is surprising, right, that there should be this kind of wrestling near the top of city government and the argument appears to be that Wheeler, who was clearly spineless and incompetent and unwilling to keep his people safe, It's being argued that he actually is too far to the right, somehow?
Like he's too much a law and order guy?
This guy who's let downtown Portland be in flames, have tremendous vandalism, etc.
And he is being marched to anarchy by the phony accusation of being authoritarian.
This is making it ever less likely that he will actually step up and do anything, which is of course part of why we have federal officers here in the first place, because it's clear to outsiders and to most insiders of the city that this is not going to end well in its current direction.
And Wheeler has said of the federal law enforcement staff that he wants them to leave, and that to the extent that they have an obligation to defend these buildings, he says, fine, go inside them and defend them from there, which is obviously preposterous.
I mean, for one thing, incendiary devices have been launched into these buildings, so The abdication of responsibility at the city level has created a federal problem and now it is being portrayed as if the federal problem isn't, you know, the federal response is inherently an overreach.
You know, it may be an overreach, but that it would be inherent that it was an overreach when the local authorities are simply not enforcing the law.
Right, so what do we say about this image that I think is spread far and wide now of a Navy veteran wearing a Navy vet garb, right, which he says he did intentionally so that in the hopes that he would get interaction, you know, decent human interaction from the officers whom he was facing,
Whom we see standing tall and proud and alone and being beaten on by police until he finally turns around and reports later that he is somewhat damaged, as you would expect he would be.
We have some thoughts about what's going on.
You want to start?
Well, I would just say that it raises a question.
I mean, it's first of all a very dramatic piece of footage.
It's quite dramatic.
That somebody is standing there and withstanding a physical attack that's quite powerful.
But there's also a question about, you know, what was the interaction that resulted in that attack?
We've heard that there had been regular announcements for many minutes up to an hour beforehand by, and I don't know if it was the police or the federal officers, to clear the area, to get out of the area.
They were going to start using, if they said tear gas, it was federal officers because local police aren't allowed to.
That looks true to me, in part because the scene is otherwise empty.
The scenes that we're seeing from that particular part of Portland at those times of night for the last consecutive, whatever you said, 54 days, is always chaotic with lots of people running back and forth and everywhere.
This looks to have been a scene that had been cleared and was attempted to be being cleared.
That presumably doesn't justify a beating.
But it also doesn't make that man as innocent as he is portraying himself.
This is the thing.
How much of what we are hearing is PR, and how would we know?
That's the question always.
We certainly experienced this at Evergreen, when we started to see the PR machine get Cripped into gear and start making actions that they knew would play well with some part of the outside world.
Yeah.
So, obviously, a tall, strong, independent man in Navy where… Patriot.
Patriot, who is being beaten on.
This looks like the authoritarian madness that we are being told is rife in every police department across the country.
But I don't think that's what we were actually saying.
Well, and you have to play it through.
So let's imagine that you decided to precipitate an event and so the police say, clear out, we're about to come through the area.
You approach them instead.
You have some interaction where you refuse to go.
Now, it might be that what they should have done is Handcuffed him and dragged him off I don't but I don't we don't know the situation because what we have is exactly what fell in the frame We don't have the context that happened before we don't have the contents of the interaction between him and the officers And so the point is yeah that looks That looks bad.
We have two we have two types of media And that story that we've all now seen at least pieces of plays really well with CNN and with NPR and with MSNBC.
And some alternative story will play really well with Fox and, you know, Fox mostly, you know, and a lot of minor outlets that don't have as much play.
But basically all of these outlets fall prey to just reporting on the narrative that they already agree with.
That's what they do.
So we actually have some footage that will illustrate your point.
So Zach, do you want to show first the attack on the building?
Yeah.
So frame this for us, this is a few nights ago, last night something, Portland?
This is in the last two nights, it may even be last night.
And you'll see they've approached the building, they've torn down the fence, and they're now approaching the building and they've set off an explosion.
Presumably that's from a large firecracker or something, but these firecrackers, they're explosives.
That's one of the federal buildings?
That's one of the two federal buildings that are under nightly attack.
Okay, so you see that.
Zach, can you do the one with the officer now?
I believe so.
Okay, this is a federal officer being physically attacked by rioters.
He gets up, the perpetrators get away.
Okay, so that's a physical attack.
And mind you, that physical attack, bad as it is, doesn't really compare to the danger of people using slingshots to launch BBs at these officers, right?
I mean, imagine what a BB coming from a slingshot will do to somebody's head if it hits them.
So anyway, these people are playing with very dangerous tactics and with weapons, many of which sound like they're not very serious.
Firecracker, slingshot, but they are very serious.
Okay, but then take those two things on the one side.
Now play the clip, uh, the remaining clip.
This is, I believe, last night.
You can see some installation art feds out of Fed goons out of PDX projected on the building, got people holding up their cell phones with the flashlight on as if they were holding up their lighters singing We Shall Overcome.
Now what's going on here?
First of all, mothers have shown up to defend the rioters.
A group of people who say we are mothers.
They are mothers.
They appear to be mothers.
Fathers apparently, or people who appear to be fathers, showed up to join the fight.
And so what we have is an allusion to past protests, very honorable protests.
Protests against the Vietnam War, for example, that are playing out in the midst of a violent And concerted attack on federal officers and federal buildings.
So the point is the edit tells you which of these things you're going to see and therefore how you're going to feel about it.
Is fascism coming to Portland or is the federal response the natural thing that has to happen when the local authorities have abdicated responsibility?
Right?
It's two stories that simply cannot be made to reconcile.
It plays out a little bit across temporal lines.
The more peaceful protests happen before dark, and the violence really ramps up after dark.
So there is the possibility that someone wandering in at one time or the other would actually not be aware of the other.
On the other hand, at this point, given what we know is happening every single night in Portland, every single night after dark into the wee hours, this time of year it gets dark pretty late, how could you be that confused about this being a totally honorable and peaceful protest?
It can't be.
It can't be at this point.
So I think the at this point is crucial and I was talking to Eric last night and thinking about some things and we were going back through some of the prior protests that have occurred especially in this part of the world and I was thinking in particular about Occupy and initially you and I were very enthusiastic about Occupy because it seemed like finally this was something new and different that was protesting things that needed to be protested like
The TARP program, too big to fail, the obvious catastrophe of credit default swaps and leveraging and all of this.
And the thing was, there was the sense that we hadn't seen anything progressive in Decades, maybe at all in our lifetime.
And suddenly there was motion where suddenly we were protesting the things that needed protesting.
And the problem is, inside it then became clear that it went from a protest against things, it was a coherent protest, to an anarchist protest.
And I tried to persuade, I mean I wrote a couple of articles in fact, trying to persuade them that anarchism was an answer to nothing and that they needed to get back on track, which of course didn't work.
But my point is, there are those who are just simply waiting for anything that doesn't look like what they've experienced.
And to the extent that the Antifa riots are portraying themselves as progressive, there are a lot of people who aren't paying close attention who think, okay, finally, right?
We're in the streets, you know?
Protesting for the right thing when in fact they're protesting for the wrong thing they're protesting for the uninvention of all of the the liberal principles on which the nation was founded and to which we were headed so And you saw, more than I did, even in Occupy, as you watched it unravel from the inside, a specific rejection of the idea of leadership.
A specific rejection of the idea that individuals should be in a position of leadership or able to, not necessarily dictate, but have the role of being able to help run, help facilitate situations and groups of people such that decisions could be made.
The idea of hierarchy was itself anathema, right?
And so this struck both of us as delusional, right?
It is this utopian vision that has no chance of actually happening.
We can do better.
We can certainly do better than what evolution has handed us, and we have lived in much more hierarchical ways in the past with much more rigid roles MG Around lots of things, like race and like sex, then we need to.
But the idea that hierarchy is itself, either we are either capable of getting rid of it, or it is worthy of being gotten rid of, both of those ideas are batshit crazy.
That makes no sense at all.
And it tells you right there that the movement has no chance of success in the way that it's claiming it wants success.
And, also, one of the ways that it works tactically is it makes it very much harder to chase it down, because who do you go after?
And, you know, one person says, all cops are bastards, and another person says, defund the police, another one says, abolish the police, another one says, we don't want any policing at all, and you go back to the first one, and they say, well, I never said that, that's not my position, and I'm Antifa, and maybe they aren't.
You know, maybe they're playing at it.
And so the lack of leadership is not only insane if you try to scale that up at a societal level, but it is actually also incredibly effective at a tactical level with regard to street-level riots.
Yeah, it runs through your fingers as you try to pin down what it is that we're even talking about.
So this is exactly my concern, is that you've got a huge fraction of the energy here in 2020 on the nominal left.
Is, well, gotta get rid of Trump.
Here's a powerful movement that says it's liberal, and, you know, look, they're singing We Shall Overcome, right?
That looks pretty good.
If it says it's liberal, it must be liberal.
If it says it's anti-racist, it must be anti-racist.
If they sing those songs, they must be on our side, because the people who used to sing those songs made sense.
It's really easy to sing songs.
It is, although there's too little of it.
I mean, what song are we singing?
A hundred percent.
I mean, of course we're going to, you know, and so singing a song is easier to fake than humor, right?
At the point that they start faking humor, then we're really doomed, I think.
But, you know, we don't, we don't see that really happening because as, you know, as, as you and Matt Taibbi pointed out, and as we've been pointing out for years, this is, this is humorless.
It's a humorless movement.
It is a humorless movement.
Um, but the problem is the intersection with the election is setting us up for disaster because so many people I mean, I hear it all the time.
People say, well, you know, when Biden gets in, this will die down.
No, the Biden camp is actually partnering with it.
They're picking up the energy from this movement.
Now, either you think the Biden camp is going to betray the movement after the election, in which case, I would say small disaster.
Or they're not going to betray the movement after the election, and we're going to start making policy based on this absurd reinterpretation of reality, and we're going to have an absolute catastrophe on our hands.
So maybe that's a good segue to talk, well first to answer a question that I got asked on Twitter that was directed at both of us, and then to talk about some of the other places we're seeing the manifestations of this, which we've talked about in many previous episodes.
But the idea that this movement is what we're seeing on the streets, and the riots in a few choice US cities at this point, no, no, it's everywhere, and it doesn't look like what's going on in the streets of Portland everywhere, far from it.
It's much more white-collar and genteel most places, and that's the way it's going to sneak in on you and get you.
We've talked about white fragility before, we've talked about what's happening in arts, and we're going to talk a little bit here about what's happening in academia still and again.
God help us always?
I hope not.
So I was asked on Twitter, this guy begins by saying, I'm a big fan, love what you guys are doing, but I do want to ask you, do you think that living in Portland, this is a quote from him, do you think that living in Portland, which seems like ground zero for the wokevolution, is coloring y'all's hopes and fears for the future?
For example, I live in a small town in Virginia.
We, thank God, haven't had 50 nights of rioting in a row.
Curious if you think that the Northwest violence will inevitably spread virally throughout the country or if it's a big city phenomenon.
And one of my first responses to that, and we should talk about it, is as we've been saying for decades, but publicly since Evergreen blew up, what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus, guys.
It was never going to.
And so this is a direct result of what's been going on on campus.
And the point of this is that it's going to spread.
And it is spreading.
And we see the media captured And, you know, arts organizations increasingly captured in higher ed and K-12 schools and increasingly the courts.
And, you know, it's capture one by one by one.
So it is it is quite possible that our lens is clouded that we are seeing this.
On the other hand, actually, you know, we live in a part of Portland where we don't have to run into this at all.
We don't see it unless we choose to go to it and figure out what we can see with our own eyes as opposed to what's been filtered by other people.
So, you know, that's also a filter that people are saying, oh my God, you're in Portland, are you safe?
Yeah.
You know, it's a few very limited, very minor, very horrifying, very at-risk-of-becoming-giant sets of movements that are happening in both downtown and eastern Portland.
Yeah, um, I think, you know, we should probably at some point catalog the misunderstandings that we think people we're talking to are having.
One of them is that this is about symbolic stuff.
This is very definitely about Power over material things.
Ultimately this results in a transfer of material things through mechanisms that are not legitimate, but nonetheless the horizontal nature of this whole movement Means that it is now infused in every place that can make a judgment.
And so, you know, hiring, firing the courts, every place that can make a judgment, there is now an expectation that these things will go in a particular direction.
Yep.
And, you know, it can't work.
It's a very short term strategy.
But will it ultimately get to you?
It will get to you.
And, you know, who's telling you that?
The people who said that it was going to escape, you know, the university system back when Evergreen was The you know the type specimen so I I think it's just certain that if something does not turn the tide that this will ultimately wash over everything and it will of course render the US a Feeble power which will create a power vacuum and then we'll find out what dynamics are really going to govern our lives Yeah
Okay, so should we talk a little bit about the stupid that's coming out of medical academia and other academia?
That sounds like fun.
Yeah, it's always fun.
Okay, Zach, put this up if you would, sweetie.
Australian doctors push renaming Adam's apple the Achilles tendon and other misogynistic terms.
This is for real.
This is not in The Onion or whatever Australia's version of The Onion is.
I can't remember at the moment.
I mean these things really speak for themselves, but… I wish they did!
Oh my god, oh my god.
So there are a lot of body parts that are named for the people who were the first people in Western science to discover them, and of course until very recently that was mostly limited to, you know, landed white men.
And okay, Fine.
What are we doing?
And the Adam's apple and the Achilles tendon, these aren't even real people, guys.
Like, this is mythology.
Right.
This is mythology.
And Achilles was a great warrior.
I don't know, maybe he was real, but for God's sake.
And the Adam's apple is an ugly lump.
And it's only men who've got it!
It's a famous vulnerability!
We're going to rename one of the parts that's actually only in men.
So, I don't even have much more on that.
It's just so absurd.
No, here's the what's more.
I mean, it's funny, but it's so unfunny because the answer is people are not extrapolating, right?
This is the level of thinking of the people who tell you they know what we're supposed to do next, right?
This is the level of thinking, right?
And the kind of language they use is often decolonize.
Decolonize our language.
And in fact, the next example is that too.
Grammar.
Rutgers English Department to de-emphasize traditional grammar, quote, in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Yeah, please.
I just read the headline of what you guys can now see.
The chair of the Rutgers English Department sent out an email announcing plans to decolonize again English by in part focusing less on grammar quote this approach from the Department of English at Rutgers email to her people.
This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar and sentence level issues so as to not put students from multilingual non-standard academic English backgrounds at a disadvantage.
So we can steelman this briefly and say I have actually taught with faculty who were really good at grammar level correction and weren't really able to see the bigger – you know, why do we write in the first place?
We don't write to have perfect grammar, we write in order to say something.
Right, so a focus entirely on grammar is misguided and will kill the spirit and creativity of the best students and, you know, actually all students, I think.
And so, should writing instruction be focused also on content and big ideas and not exclusively on copyediting but also on editing and actual content?
Of course it should.
And too many writing teachers don't do that.
I don't know if it's because they can't, or because they're lazy, or because they honestly think that grammar is the end all and be all.
But the idea that everyone shall not be held to the standards of grammar, including this isn't just for undergraduate papers, they're suggesting this for dissertations, for PhD level dissertations.
This is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
That is exactly what this is.
Trying to help people by assuring them that they won't be held to standards, that's not helping them.
That's not helping them in any way.
It's beyond the soft bigotry of low expectations.
It is, isn't it?
Yeah, because it's actually a direct insult.
Because the obviously correct thing is that these things are readily learnable and we've done a terrible job of democratizing the tools to do it.
For sure.
And the right thing to do is to democratize those tools.
To pretend that there is something within certain populations that puts correct grammar out of reach is an insane insult.
I mean, it's Robin DiAngelo all over again.
This department chair is either so confused and scared by the inaccurately named Black Lives Matter movement, or is actually personally a racist and really believes that people from backgrounds that aren't like hers can't do very well.
It's one of those two things, I think.
Like, what are the other possibilities on the table?
This is it.
But the other thing, which I never see anybody say is, all right, or actually occasionally see people say this now, if you institute these standards, you are so hobbling us nationally, that you are guaranteeing we lose our position going forward, right?
If our If PhDs cannot speak with precision because nobody has required it of them, then they will not speak with precision.
What will happen to the quality of discourse if people who are responsible for discourse do not do it with precision?
Well, then our thinking will degrade, right?
What happens in a school of engineering when you decide that logic and math are white supremacists?
Well, you stop doing logic and math, well, what happens?
Sooner or later the bridges start falling down.
How long do you imagine we can impose this nonsense on all of the systems that actually do make things work and not have them come apart?
And it's totally consistent with the idea that hierarchy is itself racist or sexist or whatever-ist you want to choose, right?
If the idea of hierarchy is itself a problem, Then you can't have better and worse.
You can't actually have assessment of quality because quality itself, if hierarchy doesn't exist, then quality doesn't exist.
There is no ranking possible on any level, which is a conflation of equal under the law with every single individual is identically capable of all things, which no one in their right mind would claim.
Every single individual is not equal and equally capable of all things, even if we manage to completely equalize all opportunity from moment one.
We vary.
That is the result of evolution.
So one way to think about this is the level of insanity of the claims that are now regularly surfacing.
The level of insanity is a direct measure of the strength of the underlying game theory of this movement.
In other words, the feebleness of the argument floats on the fact that it is very difficult to oppose it without paying a price, right?
And it is that thing, so it's this move where the idea is Here is a thing, and you have to say it.
And if you resist, then you are the thing that is being alleged.
So if you say, for example, that, you know, logic is not a white trait, then you are engaged in anti-black racism.
So the point is people then say that it is a white trait, doing all kinds of harm in the process.
But they do that and what happens is they get an immediate, it's addiction.
It's this thing.
How do you get addicted to your phone?
Somebody has figured out how to trigger these little releases of dopamine and they get you coming back for more.
So if you feel a threat and then somebody is capable of removing that threat, you may Figure out how to do the thing that keeps getting the threat to back off.
And what are you doing?
You're becoming an accomplice to the movement.
That's how you're getting the threat to back off.
But of course, it's utterly free to make a threat.
It's in this context it is free to make a threat, it is free to attack a federal building, there's all kinds of things that have become free and so what I think we're watching day in and day out at all sorts of levels is people serving their own immediate interests motivated by fear and emboldening the movement that is creating the fear.
It, you know, it's the The child who sends the adults into the cornfield and the thing is eventually you have to confront the child because there's no there's no solution that comes from everybody you know saying what the child wants you to say and that's what we're looking at.
Yeah.
No, it feels ever more juvenile, but these aren't reasonable children.
You know, man, this is a topic for many, many, many other conversations as we have had as we have raised our own children and written about childhood and what childhood is and how it is that you make strong and resilient and awesome and humor-filled and loving children.
into adults, you do not cater to their every whim and you do not run scared when they throw a tantrum.
You don't cave to tantrums ever.
And if what you do is you say, don't do that or I'll X and they keep doing it and you don't do X, they do it more.
Okay.
Of course they do.
That is basic human psychology.
Of course they do more of it.
And that is exactly what we're seeing on our streets.
It's exactly what we're seeing in boardrooms, what we're seeing in colleges.
It's what we're seeing every place.
This is really badly raised children in the bodies of adults acting like maybe they were taught to act by their parents who didn't know how to parent and never said no.
And, you know, imagine that that's all taking place on a ship and what they're doing is they're getting us to allow them to take apart the ship on which we all depend, including them.
You didn't just invoke a canoe, did you?
Wow.
No.
Okay.
Canoe is not a ship.
It's a boat, but it's not a ship.
I looked it up.
I was just, I was confused about the sudden input of ship into the conversation.
You know, it's funny because I actually really like canoes as a vessel, but I agree with you.
There is a certain amount of trauma around the idea of canoes for us at the moment.
Yeah.
Okay.
Should we talk about racism in the great outdoors?
What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
Oh boy.
This is just, I mean, this is an episode of just a lot of ridiculous.
Um, yeah, now you can show this, Zach.
Oregon's natural spaces feel off-limits to Black people, we are told.
This is OPB, this is Oregon Public Broadcasting, Oregon's NPR station.
We're being told that parks and trailheads are slowly reopening as the As they should be.
We've got an extended anecdote from someone, a black woman, who explains that while she was excited initially when she moved to Portland area to start going outside, when she did go she found that she was one of very few black people on the trails and And then the logical leap felt that that was due to racism and that she was experiencing racism from all the non-black people that she saw.
There is a quote in this article.
I don't know exactly where it is on the page right now.
Quote, recent data from the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department shows black people are underrepresented as visitors to state parks.
They make up 2.2% of Oregon's population and 0.9% of daily visitors and 1.9% of overnight visitors to parks.
So it's a really white state.
Whole Pacific Northwest is really, really, really white, right?
2.2% of the population is black.
That's about 1 in 50.
Therefore, even if there was exact representation, due to race on the trails, only 1 in 50 people you'd see would be black.
You'd still feel like You were rare, because you are.
And that may be due to other issues that might need addressing, but that has nothing to do with whether or not the trails don't have enough black people on them.
Overnight visitors 1.9% versus 2.2% total.
That doesn't look far off at all.
0.9% of daily visitors.
We don't know if that's actually not representative.
There are no statistics here.
And even if it were, What is it that the claim is that is keeping people of color, black people, off the trails?
Well, I read as far into this article as I could get myself to read, and the person, and I, you know, I don't want to belittle her perspective.
For one thing, it may be accurate, but what she says is that it's the looks that she gets from people on the trails.
Which, the problem is, we're now in the evergreen paradigm, which is, okay, That claim in and of itself could mean that you're getting looks that mean something, or it could mean that you're getting looks but you're misinterpreting them, or it could be that you're not getting looks and you're imagining it.
We have no way of knowing.
You would have to test this somehow.
But the thing that's getting me is I don't know where it is, somewhere in one of our early live streams.
I used this exact example to prove that the fact of a disparity in representation does not mean that it's racism, right?
You will find blacks underrepresented in recreational cycling, for example.
Yes.
I've worked in a bike shop.
Is that because bike shops are in some way reluctant to sell bikes to black people?
No.
Bike shops are inhabited by liberals who probably, if anything, would feel extra good about doing so.
So it's not the bike shops.
I don't think... I've never seen any evidence that a bike lane was racist.
I just...
It's very hard to see where the bias would be, right?
You realize that you are now introducing hypotheses into the world that some people will take and run with or bike with or something!
Something!
But look, let's be honest about this and let's steel man the position.
I actually do think there's racism somewhere in these biases, right?
In which biases?
The biases that we would see racially on trails or bike lanes or something, right?
The racism is way, way, way, way, way upstream, okay?
It has to do with differential access.
In other words, why do you and I end up on trails, right?
We came from families who did this.
Where did the families get this idea?
Well, they had, A, it was in the culture of those families that, you know, neither of them came from privilege, but There was a certain amount of access, there was a certain amount of expectation, and the point is, different people end up valuing different things.
Now, I think it'd be great if people spent more time outdoors, irrespective of who they were, right?
I think we need more outdoor space in order to make that better, right?
So that you can actually get away from people, given the huge population of the planet.
The fact that there may be some differential access issue that has kept some populations farther away from trails does not mean that there's anything about those modern day trails that is in any way less accessible, right?
So culture is the clear conspicuous likely place that some sort of bias would live, not at the trailhead.
Right.
And it's also true, and this is also a point that we've made multiple times before, that when you get looks that don't seem right and that aren't the looks that you were hoping for or expecting, you can think of yourself and what demographic markers you have and imagine that it is due to the ones that are most likely to have bias against them in the population.
And sometimes that will be true.
You know, sometimes I get looks, or comments, or yelled at, or whatever, and it is because I'm a woman, and the dude yelling at is a dude, and that is what it is, and sometimes it's not.
And with regard to sexism, you can tell, in part, when it is because of the nature of the comments.
And sometimes you can't tell for sure at all.
And with race, obviously you could tell in the context of some comments, but Boy, that's not what's happening on the trails.
And she doesn't say that no one is making explicitly racist comments to this woman and her son on the trails, but is she getting looks of surprise?
Shock?
Disappointment?
Interest?
Pleasure?
Any number of things that might also be mixed.
Mixed with or, you know, causally related to not, I don't think you belong here, but I didn't expect to see you because actually, you know, no one's doing this math explicitly, but 1 in 50 people are black in Oregon and frankly fewer than that tend to end up on the trails.
Yeah.
And that has nothing to do with therefore I don't want you on the trails.
So, I experienced this a little bit in a different place, and I just want to talk about, I think, how you deal with this responsibly when you don't know what you're up against, okay?
When my last name gets invoked, I often see something flash across the eyes of somebody that I'm interacting with, right?
And, you know, I'm betting that some fraction of the time it's, oh, Jewish, right?
Now, sometimes that might be an anti-Semite.
Very rarely, I would imagine.
Right?
But the point is, there's no content in just the flicker of somebody has recognized something that you can interpret with any sort of certainty.
Right?
So, you have to file it agnostically.
What was that?
I don't know.
And I assume it's nothing.
And even if it was some sort of mild antisemitism or suspicion or something that somebody harbors, A, what happens next is the interaction likely overwhelms whatever prejudice they walked into it with.
And, you know, we know We know this.
We know that what addresses prejudice successfully is interaction.
And so prejudice, I'm not sure we're using the words exactly identically, but let's establish first how we're using them before I say this.
Prejudice can be due to bigotry or due to ignorance.
These are two different sources.
A prejudice in which someone is walking into an interaction, finds out that you're X.
And goes, I don't know about that.
Could be due to actual bigotry.
I think you are less.
I have reason to think you are less because you're X. Or I just have no exposure to you and I have no idea and therefore I kind of don't know what to do.
Yeah.
I wonder, and maybe you don't want to, I didn't ask you in advance, if you want to say something about the first time you met my grandfather.
Yeah, sure.
Let me just say, prejudice-wise, all I'm saying, I'm just going as literal as possible.
Just some sort of prejudgment, some sort of assumption about what I will be that doesn't come from any information.
So I think then prejudice can be due either to bigotry or to ignorance.
Yep.
And those two things are being conflated across the board in the current movement, right?
You know, Black Lives Matter and white fragility and how to be an anti-racist and all of these things.
Are imagining that, you know, I have made the claim many times and I firmly believe that the very few Americans are actually racist, but I think that a fair number are somewhat ignorant.
And I think a number of people who are falling prey to this, oh my god, I'm going to genuflect because I'm scared that I'm a racist so I must be a racist.
I think most of those people are not actually racist, but they're naive, they're ignorant, they don't have experience of the world, of other cultures, of other people, and that ignorance is actually so, so, so different from real bigotry.
And the complation of those two is demonic.
It's awful.
Yeah, it is demonic.
Because for one thing, A, Willful ignorance might be one thing, but just simple ignorance?
The fact is A, exposure erases it, and B, for many of us, I mean, I've said many times, I have no doubt that I am ignorant on every axis that I am not a participant.
I will always be somewhat ignorant of what it is like to be gay, to be a woman, to be black, because I'm not any of these things.
However, I'm interested on all of those fronts to reduce that ignorance as much as possible, right?
Yeah.
What else can I do?
So, you know, do you really want to, you know, persecute somebody that they're for being racist on the basis of ignorance that they are actively trying to address?
No, that would be absurd.
Yeah.
And yet, that's where we are somehow.
So yeah, your grandfather.
You know, there was definitely a flash of recognition that he was dealing with a Jewish person.
Clearly he didn't have a lot of exposure.
So I think you need to set it up a little bit.
This is northeastern Iowa.
Throughout my father's and my father's siblings growing up, they were on a farm.
And he had spent some time traveling around North Dakota and some of the other northern Midwestern states, but he was basically he was a German Catholic.
He didn't immigrate, but I don't actually remember.
I think either he was either second or third generation.
immigrant, and just had traveled a fair bit within northern white North America is all.
And you were almost certainly the first Jewish person that he met at the point that I brought you and I think my dad and you and I all went out there.
My dad had flown out to Chicago, and we'd all driven out to Iowa to see him for maybe a Thanksgiving or something.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean... And so this would have been in the 90s sometime.
It's not too much to say, except that there was definitely a palpable tension about something, which I took to be about that, and it didn't persist because interaction doesn't allow it to persist.
You know, I remember it more explicitly than this.
Oh, you do?
Yeah.
And, you know, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe my memory is wrong.
But I remember him actually responding to being introduced to you by me with an epithet that he didn't think was wrong.
I believe that he said Jew boy.
He did.
I did.
I don't remember this.
And I had this immediate reaction.
I think I even put out my hands like, ah, crap, like what?
And I never spent a lot of time with him.
I didn't know him very, very well.
And you, as I remember it, sort of put your hands out to me and said, no.
Not a big deal.
Let's talk.
And you then, the two of you, as I remember it, then had a conversation for, I don't know if it was 20 minutes or two hours, but something between those two things, in which you didn't talk about Judaism and you didn't talk about Jewishness, but you engaged with each other as human beings.
And he wasn't less ignorant of Judaism as a result, right?
Because that's not what you're about and it's not what you were talking about.
But what he did know at the end of it was that you were a deep, rich, compassionate human being with all of these All of these insights and capabilities that he would hope for in the partner of his granddaughter, and that identifying anyone by a word that is singular and reductive is not the way to engage people.
Yeah, and it actually brings back up this question about the proposal.
Was it Duke that is changing its grammar?
Oh, Rutgers.
Rutgers, yeah.
Here's my concern, is that actually this language thing might actually be about something.
You don't say.
Yeah, I do say.
I mean, watch this.
I'm even going to use language in order to explain my point.
You'll see how it works.
You'll catch right on, I'm sure.
I can't wait.
But the thing is, if you don't have, imagine that you're faced with somebody who has a prejudice against you, but doesn't share a language, right?
It's very hard to overcome that prejudice because you can't deliver evidence that actually tells them that actually you're of like mind about values or something like that, assuming that's the case.
But then we can extend this, which is, if you share no language, you have very few tools with which to do this.
They might see you engage in behavior that is inconsistent with their prejudice, but the chances of that are pretty low because it requires circumstances to bring it out.
But my point would be, The better the language that you share, the more tools you have to erode those prejudices and to fill in the ignorance with information.
And to the extent that what we are going to do is take the rules away from grammar, for example, in order not to ostensibly disadvantage anybody, what we're also doing is taking away the expectation of a shared paradigm in which you can reach somebody.
And if I can remind people, Of the story that I told about living in Jamaica.
The thing about the Jamaican kids, who were so fascinated by me, because I came from a different world, but I took them seriously.
I would answer their questions, for example, and they had lots of scientific questions they wanted answered, was they spoke two languages.
They spoke Patois, which I didn't speak well.
I understood some, but I struggle with Patois.
It's very difficult.
But they, because television and school takes place in the Queen's English, as it were, Speak my language perfectly which means there was no trouble connecting with them right because they could step into this idiom in which we could exchange information and so I'm not in some sense I do think we might have to step into a world where we actually all do have a language so that we are not
Tripping over the border between English and Chinese for example and you know military matters are at stake you know I think we might actually need to have the ultimate tool to protect planet Earth from our de facto sectarian differences.
But that doesn't mean you can't retain the languages in which we prefer to speak to each other, but we cannot sacrifice our ability to update to some standard.
Not because that standard is best, but because we need some standard that we can all go to in order to exchange information with each other.
And for us to tear that apart inside of the US, so we don't even have a common language anymore, Um, is just so dangerous.
Well, and it's part of what is being done with this, um, careful and often explicit renaming of things in which words are, um, don't mean what they appear to mean.
And... Hey, Zach?
What?
You want to fix the screen?
Maybe I should deliver yours.
Why don't you go ahead and talk?
I don't know what you're going to say.
That's the problem.
How about if you tell me what you were going to say?
Sorry, you just have to be on screen.
That's fine.
There we go.
Boy, what were we talking about?
Language.
You need to have a common standard.
Yes.
So, you know, redefining racism out from under us that Robin DiAngelo has tried to do and has managed to successfully, you know, import to a lot of places, is a way of guaranteeing that we don't have communication between us.
And I do wonder though, this is, I suspect we're coming up on an hour and I have at least one more thing that we want to talk about before we...
Before we're done here, maybe just an asterisk for a later time.
You've said this thing before about feeling, you know, chagrined, not happy about it, but you think that we might all need one language in order to talk.
So again, just an asterisk for a later time.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which posits that the language you use shapes what you think and what actually you can think, In its strongest form is generally not agreed on by, as far as I can tell, almost any linguist at this point, but a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
There seems to be a tremendous amount of evidence for it, actually.
The language that you use actually shapes how you think and your thought patterns, and this goes far beyond just word choice.
It's also about syntax and semantics.
And I suspect, although I haven't even ever seen it in a discussion of Sapir-Whorf, for instance, whether you have an ideographic versus an alphabetic language.
I can't remember the words for it at this point, but whether or not you use an alphabet or have effectively pictograms that you're using is going to actually shape How you think, and I suspect using an alphabet will tend towards somewhat more reductive thinking and less holistic thinking.
Even within alphabet-using languages, having subject-verb-object versus subject-object-verb may have effects in terms of how you prioritize and imagine the hierarchy of objects and subjects in the universe.
Yeah.
So it will be a tough sell and potentially destructive of some cultures to have there be a global language and have some languages disappear.
Yeah.
Here's the thing.
I would love to live on that world where the cultures aren't being destroyed, but like at the moment that everybody got connected to the same internet and is now subscribed to the same few platforms, yada, yada, yada, on and on.
We started doing this in earnest and so the insulation that these cultures actually have from each other is minimal and degrading over time Without a purpose and so my point is actually we've got a lot of stuff riding on the fact that we don't have Misunderstandings that cause us to you know nuke each other or invade each other and so you know it's not without Reservation that I say we would need a single language in order to properly manage the affairs of Earth But I guess my point is
Preserving the thing that would be preserved by us not doing that?
It's not happening.
We're losing that thing and we're gonna lose it and then we're gonna blow ourselves up because we don't understand what the people on the other side are saying.
And that just seems an absurd waste to me.
Yeah, so maybe we return to this.
One more topic.
We had some stuff to talk about with regard to COVID-19, but we'll save that for another time.
But I wanted to bring up this.
There's a study that was done many years ago that back in 2012-2013 was much discussed on the value of blind auditions, specifically in the hiring of musicians for orchestras.
And Christina Hoff Summers has done an excellent takedown of the original study, in which she explains why it does not actually say what people were thinking it said.
I do not know exactly where that is.
She does a FemSplainer somewhere on that.
But we were basically told that in order for all the bias that existed in orchestras, specifically against women, to be solved, there needed to be blind auditions.
That was published in The Guardian in 2013.
Zach, if you want to show my screen.
Yeah, so now in 2020 we have the New York Times arguing that to make orchestras more diverse we need to end blind auditions, because of course the audition process being blind means that not enough people of diverse race, gender, and quote-unquote other factors will be taken into effect.
Um, so this is just, this is the end of the scientific process, this is the end of reason, this is the end of logic and everything else.
You can't have it both ways, you who are arguing that we need more diverse people in orchestras.
You can't have it both ways.
You can have it both ways.
That is your white logic that says you can't have it both ways.
That is my use of the scientific method.
Also white.
I think we're done here.
Yeah, I mean, at some level, that's why we're fighting over this, is because if logic, then none of this stands up.
If not logic, then anything goes, and then it's all about power, which is an absurd place to want to go.
No, and also, I mean, so that New York Times article, they don't even say sex, they say gender.
And which, you know, the original was supposedly about sex and getting more women in orchestras, and as Christina Hoff Summers argued, it didn't actually work.
Anyway, but again, a conversation for another time.
These categories that you can opt into in the progressive stack that allow you to basically gain affirmative action, which is what's being argued for here, people are going to be opting into them and we know they already are, right?
So trans is a particularly obvious one.
There are real trans people out there and they're very very rare and what we see making such a ruckus and a mess of things all over social media and on the streets and everywhere are the trans rights activists who are taking advantage of the fact that in many places You don't have to even be considering surgery or even hormones in order to declare yourself trans.
All you have to do is adopt some really regressive gender norms, put on a dress, put on some makeup, call yourself a woman, and boom, you're trans.
You get to rise in a progressive stack.
That's regressive and nasty.
And disability is another one, because we've had an explosion of so many diagnoses and conditions, and many of them are invisible.
Uh, and that means that really all someone would have to do if they wanted to game the system was declare themselves disabled with some condition that no one can see or perceive or is allowed to ask about, and boom, you've won yourself some more oppression points.
So, uh, gameable in every way.
Alright.
Prediction.
Good.
The New York Times will soon embrace the idea not only of removing Blind auditions, but adding deaf auditions.
Deaf auditions being... For orchestras.
Yeah, for orchestras, exactly.
Because... All they want to see is a demographic card.
Exactly.
Auditions that are not deaf discriminate against oppressed people who do not play an instrument.
Am I right?
Yeah.
I mean, given that we're suspending the laws of logic, I think it's as logical as anything.
I am reminded of when we were in college at UC Santa Cruz in the early 90s.
Having there be a talk show host on the campus radio station who had a speech impediment that was so intense that he or she, I don't honestly know which, could not make themselves understood to the people they were interviewing.
And the people they were interviewing would almost always have to take the questions and after the person interviewing them would read them.
ASK THEM THEMSELVES, SO THAT THE PEOPLE LISTENING COULD HEAR.
Now this seemed like it had to be a parody, and this is a long time ago.
But it was not a parody, and it's exactly what you're talking about.
There are some jobs that if you have a speech impediment, you should not have.
Not ideal.
And one of them is a job in which the only thing you are projecting into the universe is in fact your voice.
All right.
If you are, in fact, incompetent as a musician, you should not be playing in an orchestra.
I'd be like, go ahead, cancel me.
Seriously.
All right.
So before we close out here, I just want to point out that here and there was a good piece that reveals the same thing earlier this week, which I guess we're not going to show.
But here's the thing.
I know that the joke I made Right?
Accusing you, as you invoked science, accusing you of using a white thing.
In the context that science is understood to be a positive thing, like as between two scientists, saying that it is a white thing is deeply racist, obviously.
That's why the joke is funny, right?
If you are saying it in order to neutralize somebody's claim that something is accurate in order to advance this woke nonsense, then it is apparently anti-racist.
So the very same claim has both valences depending upon what you're doing, which is the height of illogic, obviously. - It's the natural endpoint of postmodernism.
It is.
We are going to be uploaded to the postmodern cloud.
The postmodern Borg.
Yeah.
It's a regrettable place for us to spend the rest of our day, as few as they may be.
Okay.
On that happy note.
Yeah.
No, I was hoping to have more hope.
More hope.
Yes.
Yes.
Well, there's always the next live stream.
We could try to come up with some hope.
Okay, so you want to say anything about Unity 2020 before we go to the next... Not right now.
Well, let's just say stay tuned to this channel.
We have a big upcoming announcement.
We are working on tech to make sure that the thing we are announcing will be firing on all cylinders at the point we bring it to you all, but I think you're going to enjoy it.
So stay tuned is the basic message.
Big things are happening.
Yep.
Next Sunday at 11am Pacific, we will have our private Q&A for Dark Horse members, which you can become by joining at my Patreon.
And you can join the Discord server on either of our Patreons.
And we have a Clips channel that's now live as well at Dark Horse Clips.
