The Woke Contrarian

I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

Category: That’s Racist!

The Return of Resident Rump

2024-11-06 / / 0 Comments

Did you seriously think that a standard-issue Democrat who happens to be a Black South Asian woman had a chance of winning against a white male cult leader whose entire political career is based on celebrity and pandering? Some Redditors were idiotically predicting a fucking landslide for Harris, which I always thought absurd. If Biden didn’t win in a landslide against Trump, why would Harris?

I hate Trump as much as the next guy. And I also hate being right when I’m pessimistic.

But I was never confident that the Democratic candidate, whether that was Biden, Harris, or someone else, had what it took to forestall a Trump victory. I have been pessimistic about this election since the beginning of this year, when Trump easily won the Republican primaries.

I do not fault the Democratic Party for deciding on Harris. She is the sitting vice president and had the best chance of getting campaign funds. The fault here was Biden’s, since he failed to step down and stupidly decided to run for reelection instead, despite his advanced age. But even then, any Democrat would have faced an uphill climb against Trump, given the state of the economy as perceived by the average voter.

Much of this is attributable to Trump’s personality cult and this country’s deep political polarisation. Even if you set aside Harris’s race and gender, Trump is the kind of candidate who gets irregular voters to come out for him every time he is on the ballot, even though they don’t care about any other candidate but him. There are a lot of people who aren’t even Republicans, but they love Trump so much that they register GOP just so they can vote for their “God-Emperor” in the primaries. He has managed to have people marching in his name and starting riots. People see him as a Jesus substitute. This is not a candidate who loses handily, even against someone vastly more intelligent and competent than he is (and that’s most of the people he’s run against, though I wouldn’t call Biden particularly intelligent). His loss to Biden was in a squeaker. And Trump can also rely on just enough voters who will pull the lever for anyone with an (R) after his name, even when it’s a raping, lying, cheating, grifting fraudster. No matter what, they’ll reliably vote Republican. Trump can pool together the reliable Republicans and the “nonpartisan” MAGA cultists and win, and that seems to be what he’s done. I’m not a pollster, of course, so my perceptions could be off base. But judging by what I’ve seen of Trump and his supporters for the past nine years, I believe it is plausible.

Dumb takes on intelligence

2024-09-28 / / 0 Comments

On the one hand, there’s the entirety of Paul Cooijmans’s oeuvre. On the other hand, there’s Kaninchen Zero’s “Ableist Word Profile: Intelligence.” Both are supremely stupid.

Cooijmans’s concept of intelligence can be reduced to testing. Not intelligent behaviour, not developmental history, just testing. But the tests are supposed to reflect the ways that people recognise patterns, process information, and generate new knowledge. He can’t see the forest for the trees. (He’s also the kind of scum who links to white-nationalist sites like American Renaissance.)

In some ways, Kaninchen Zero’s post is even worse, mostly because we’re supposed to be on the same side. At least you know what you’re getting with Cooijmans—racist, sexist, ableist bullshit. Kaninchen, on the other hand, cannot separate individual differences in cognitive ability (which obviously exist, or we wouldn’t have a diagnosis called “intellectual disability” that necessitated accommodations) from the misuses of intelligence testing. It is a poorly argued mess.

Go right ahead and criticise biased IQ tests. But to pretend that intelligence doesn’t exist is to pretend that humanity doesn’t exist.

Dear Mom…

2024-09-03 / / 0 Comments

(CW: rape, domestic violence, child sexual abuse, emotional abuse, misogyny, homophobia, religious fundamentalism)

I know you’ll never see this letter. But I’ve got to write it anyway.

I have been deeply concerned about you since I left home nearly twenty years ago.

It’s about Dad. He has been the worst thing to happen to you in your sixty-two years of existence. You have thrown away your ambitions, your intellectual curiosity, your wit and humour, your very soul. You told me that you wanted to study forensic science, that you wanted to go into a law-focused undergraduate programme. Instead, you threw all that aside for Dad. Dad has brought pain, suffering, and alienation to the women in his life—and one man. My sister and I have pulled away from him, but you are still trapped in his net.

Continue reading

Dumb Dichotomies: the settler/Indigenous construct

2024-03-27 / / 0 Comments

When you divide Americans (as well as others from similar cultures) into “settlers” and “Indigenous,” you are unintentionally excluding Black people, who were brought to this continent by force. Stolen people did not steal this land. Instead, we were stolen from our own lands. This kind of good-and-evil, dichotomous thinking doesn’t stop anti-Indigenous racism. Instead, it just drives wedges and ends up alienating Black people.

(There is so much about “anti-imperialist” and “decolonial” cant that makes me want to pitch something out of a window—and I come from a miscellany of colonised cultures. I do not feel represented by these people at aaaaaaaaall. It’s sad when you have friends and colleagues talking like this, but you don’t want to make them feel bad.)

A random list of political bullshit I’m tired of

2024-03-01 / / 0 Comments
  • Promoting “decolonial” or “postcolonial” movements that are just racist, nationalist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, chauvinistic, fascist, religious fundamentalist, reactionary, intolerant tripe that merely mirrors former colonisers’ crimes. Or if they’re not regressive right-wing juntas, they’re capitalist, “reformist” states that sell the country out to the highest imperialist bidder, as long as that imperialist isn’t one that they were recently ruled by. And, of course, some countries can exemplify both these tendencies. (America, Burma, Jamaica, Ukraine, Nigeria, Israel and Palestine, I’m looking at all of you.)
  • Related to the earlier point, promoting a “decolonial” (I actually hate this expression) approach that comes primarily from highly educated, upper-middle-class or upper-class members of colonised cultures. (Uh, like me. Just the highly educated part, though—I grew up working class and am now part of the squeezed middle-middle class.)
  • Thinking that all social injustices can be solved by voting in the right politicians.
  • Refusing to vote when one candidate is a milquetoast liberal and the other one is a borderline fascist. I don’t like centrist Democrats either, but Donald Trump was and is more dangerous. This kind of voting is harm reduction. (Unfortunately, it’s practically impossible to do foreign-policy harm reduction in American electoral politics—this needs to be a long-term project—but at least you can do something about domestic policy.)
  • Stringing together a lot of jargonistic terms that cause people to shut down. It feels as though I’m being hit over the head with words like bourgeois, settler-colonialist, base and superstructure, decolonial, carceral, cisheteropatriarchy, kyriarchy. You shouldn’t need a master’s degree in women’s & gender studies or political science to get involved with activism. I hate cops as much as the next leftist, but you should be clearer.
  • Repeating terms like neoliberal and bourgeois as though it were self-evident what they meant. (Admittedly, I have referred to neoliberalism here, and I probably shouldn’t have, since it’s vague.)

 

Stealth racism from white disability activists

2024-02-15 / / 0 Comments

White (and it’s ALWAYS white) disability activists: Intelligence is our species’ fucking calling card, and you want to tell my Black ass that it doesn’t exist? Y’all got me twisted. I’m not talking about what you get on one of those culturally biased IQ tests (and they all are, even the “culture-fair” ones*), because those are rigged against us anyway. (Considering the fact that all the major ones come from the United States, racial rigging is to be expected, sadly enough. Brown v. Board has been law for less than a century.) I’m talking about the raw ability itself, not proxy measures.

I know you do this to avoid racism. I know you want to respect people with intellectual disabilities. These are noble goals. But the way it comes across is, frankly, kind of racist. Because Black folks have wanted you to see our intelligence, our knowledge, our wisdom, our reason respected for centuries. Either intelligence has a big “White Only” sign on it, or you say it’s all made up by white people. You trying to sell me woof tickets? You are still making it all about yourselves—and continuing to look racist in the process. Either way, Black people never get to be intelligent. White people set the boundaries every goddamn time.

I have had white disability activists jumping down my throat because I don’t subscribe to the “intelligence doesn’t exist/is all socially constructed” view. I don’t even talk about it much these days because of it. But I am sick to death of this “antiracist” racism.

*Yes, I meant that. In Cross-cultural neuropsychological assessment: theory and practice, V. Nell (2000) encountered a Black South African woman in his practice whose eager, intelligent behaviour didn’t match her performance on the pattern-matching test, which would have reflected an intellectual disability if it were accurate. It turns out that she thought the ‘official’ method for solving the problems was too obvious, and actually thought what the tester wanted was more complex.

Racism and sexism are the radical idea that people don’t have brains

2024-02-12 / / 1 Comment

And for that reason, these prejudices are the height of stupidity. To be racist or sexist* is to dehumanise oneself, not just your victim. It is to pretend that penises and dark skin, or vulvas and light skin (none of which are the seat of cognition) trump (or Trump) the content of one’s thinking.

(*As always, “sexism” refers not just to misogyny, but homophobia and transphobia as well.)

Dear Marxists,

2023-10-22 / / 0 Comments

…it is racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and ableism that are distractions from the class struggle, not the drive to eliminate these prejudices. By dismissing—or in some cases, upholding—these hostilities, you make it possible for the ruling classes to drive women, queer people, immigrants and disabled people from socialism. “They’re no better than the conservatives, since they’ll also ban me from transitioning or marrying my partner.” “They’re no better than the current leaders, since they won’t care if I’m going to be killed by the police because they see members of my race as dangerous.” “I can’t get involved with this movement because they’re going to ban abortion and weaken domestic-violence laws.” The message, whether tacit or explicit, is that some proletarians (men, ethnic or racial majorities, straight and cis people) are worth more than others. And when it’s explicit, when you actively express racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia or any other non-class prejudice, you are just as divisive as the “Lean In” feminists or those who focus on racial injustice without considering socioeconomic inequality. Any movement that dehumanises me, that says I don’t deserve basic rights, that claims I’m inferior—why would I join your stupid revolution? It would be all the same to me, just as it would be all the same for a poor or working-class person in a society that has eliminated all non-class discrimination.

If you want to get rid of identity politics, then don’t excuse or perpetuate the social divisions that give rise to it.

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