Reading List – On The Culture

The meaning of woke

[Can We Please Stop Caring What Partisan Hack Bill Maher Thinks?]

Why the grim portrait painted by the new AAU study does not reflect reality.

The Debate Over Repressed and Recovered Memories

Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It

How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory

Moreover, the ugly and perverse relationship between Weinstein and Mann, in which each attempted to use the other for gain, occurred in the transactional business environment of Hollywood and American public life generally. The sickness of their relations developed out of a dynamic of mutual exploitation. In the process of procuring whatever it was they wanted – whether sex, money, a Hollywood career – they tested the limits of self-degradation.

How evolutionary psychology ended up at the heart of the culture wars

As a celebrity on the internet, Merchant admits that he’s “quite dull”, a result of being skittish about causing offence. He remembers once being about to tweet about New Zealand, but then being unsure if the term “Kiwi” is problematic. “When you’re policing yourself in that way, because you don’t want the headache of it [if it goes wrong], it’s absurd to me.” Writing television, he adds, you have numerous people figuring things out behind closed doors and having the space to be thoughtful. The speed and brevity of Twitter, meanwhile, leaves no such room.
“I’ve become more and more cautious because I don’t want to get into a debate,” he says. “I don’t want to have to defend a tweet from 10 years ago. It’s not interesting to me to spend time defending a point of view or a glib joke that I made at 2am.”

We’re creating in a culture of intolerance

We are now in a time when a sexual encounter can be recast in a malevolent light, no matter whether the participants all appeared to consider it consensual at the time and no matter how long ago it took place. Looking back, it can be even harder—perhaps impossible— to know what really happened in a private sexual encounter.

he too often confuses human nature with racism

Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz slammed MSNBC’s handling of a segment in which she detailed her experiences contending with online harassment 

In the course of their fight for tolerance, many progressives have become intolerant of those who disagree with them or express other opinions and taken on a kind of self-righteousness and censoriousness that the right long displayed and the left long abhorred. It has made people uncertain about the contours of speech: Many know they shouldn’t utter racist things, but they don’t understand what they can say about race or can say to a person of a different race from theirs. Attacking people in the workplace, on campus, on social media and elsewhere who express unpopular views from a place of good faith is the practice of a closed society. Unanswerable Prayers

Unanswerable Prayers

Freddie deBoer: Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand

There is no such thing as punching up or punching down. The entire notion is an absurd pretense. For it to make any sense at all, human beings would have to exist on some unitary plane of power and oppression, our relative places easily interpreted for the purpose of figuring out who we can punch.

How Musk could burst Obama’s ‘disinformation’ bubble

Professor Obama lectures about disinformation

Elon Musk wants to re-engineer the “public square”

Bill Maher Is Stand-up Comedy’s Past. Hannah Gadsby Represents Its Future

Bill Maher’s Alternate Reality

Elon Musk blames Netflix’s failing fortunes on ‘the woke mind virus’

Why Woke Comedy’s ‘Punching Down’ Rule Is an Absolute Farce

Comedians’ Obsession With Their Haters Is Ruining Comedy

Louis C.K. Sexual Harassment Accuser Slams Grammy Win: ‘Nobody Cares. That’s the Message This Sends’

If you don’t want to hear an edgy joke, don’t listen

I’m sympathetic to the hunger many Black women and people with disabilities feel for champions who will stand up to persistent ugliness. But the definition of real manhood as the willingness to land a blow on a woman’s behalf is sour and cynical, as well as retrograde.

“Nobody ever fell from a pedestal into anything but a pit,”

“This on top of all the other cancellation really starts to erode a comedian’s right to do comedy,” said Carla Sims, Dave Chappelle’s publicist and a member of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. “I supported Chris from the beginning as I saw it happen.”

Apart from a bit of press-release groveling — a big mistake on the part of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who shouldn’t have indulged these babies — the activists got zilch. The special remains up, without a trigger warning. Far from ditching Chappelle, Netflix is re-upping with the standup, who has agreed to produce and host four new specials highlighting other comics whose work Chappelle likes.  And the activists? They just sort of….shut up and went back to work after their meaningless little break. Maybe some of them quit the company. From Netflix’s point of view, who cares? Chappelle is a huge draw to the service. Retaining him matters a lot more than whether a handful of self-righteous fringe characters are happy. Netflix’s refusal to make any substantive policy concessions should be a model to every company that is getting bombarded with demands from the people who came of age on woke college campuses where it’s the norm to boycott, block or shout over people you disagree with.

Will Gen X please stand up? I have something I want to say to you — to us. We grew up in a country that didn’t ban books. We all agreed that witch hunts and blacklists were bad. Censorship was an outrage. The 1980s were not that long ago. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. So obviously we’ve got a problem here. Everybody can see it. Everybody knows where it’s heading. What we don’t have — yet — is a group of people who are willing to do something about it.

The Complete Guide to Will Smith Slap Takes

What Will Smith’s slap means for comedy

The Changing Face of History in US High Schools

The Rhetoric of Pop Psychology

David Brooks: How racist is America? | COMMENTARY

Jordan Peterson, the culture war psychologist of YouTube

Everything’s Awesome and Camille Paglia is Unhappy

European Millennials are not like their American counterparts

The Fierce Racism Backlash to Tyra Banks’ ‘America’s Next Top Model’.

I disagree with the argument of this piece, it’s an eloquent defense (I didn’t even know one was possible until I read this) of cancel culture

Unfortunately, the world’s most prominent specialists are rarely held accountable for their predictions, so we continue to rely on them even when their track records make clear that we should not.

Thanatos is the force of self-preservation in us. It is quite happy to watch the whole world burn down — as long as we stand atop the embers. Thanatos is the need in us for superiority, for conquest, for primacy.

How perfectionism has become an epidemic for millenials.

I always thought The Lindy Effect really makes no sense

The very BEST review of Taleb, and this like him 🙂

How to respect, without excusing, thinkers from the past.

Why Americans Struggle to Understand Social Democracy

He was a rebel, against orthodoxy of all kinds.

The political roots of the term ‘modernity’

Reconsidering divorce in Nigeria

Les Moonves and the Familiarity Fallacy

Because George Soros has always had his eyes open

“that access to the means of sustaining good health, the opportunity to learn from the wisdom accumulated in our culture, and the expectation that one may do so in a decent home and neighborhood are not privileges to be reserved for the few who have learned to game the system. They are rights that follow from the same source as those that an earlier generation called life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Why men are not vulnerable – and why they should be

I think that that’s such a metaphor of something for the existence of so-called well-off people that they’re not really well-off — they won’t even scream in their own house.

The origins of purpose-driven Rwanda

I thought these exact thoughts. Someone fleshed them out.

Roseanne’s astonishing success should serve as a much-needed wake-up call