Category Archives: Political Correctness

In our uncertain age, which can so often feel so dark and disturbing, Steven Pinker has distinguished himself as a voice of positivity. This has been a boon for him, as his books, like The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018), have been best sellers and elevated the Harvard cognitive psychologist, who is 66, beyond academia and into the realm of the public intellectual. Theyve also generated no small amount of disagreement, with Pinkers critics arguing, to cite two common examples, that his view of the world is overly sympathetic to the excesses of capitalism and too callous about the profound hardships still faced by so many. His latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, takes on another provocatively large subject and will be published on Sept. 28. Many philosophers that I know, says Pinker, think that the world would be better if more people knew a bit of logic.

Your new book is driven by the idea that it would be good if more people thought more rationally. But people dont think theyre irrational. So what mechanisms would induce more people to test their own thinking and beliefs for rationality? Ideally thered be a change in our norms of conversation. Relying on an anecdote, arguing ad hominem these should be mortifying. Of course no one can engineer social norms explicitly. But we know that norms can change, and if there are seeds that try to encourage the process, then there is some chance that it could go viral. On the other hand, a conclusion that I came to in the book is that the most powerful means of getting people to be more rational is not to concentrate on the people. Because people are pretty rational when it comes to their own lives. They get the kids clothed and fed and off to school on time, and they keep their jobs and pay their bills. But people hold beliefs not because they are provably true or false but because theyre uplifting, theyre empowering, theyre good stories. The key, though, is what kind of species are we? How rational is Homo sapiens? The answer cant be that were just irrational in our bones, otherwise we could never have established the benchmarks of rationality against which we could say some people some of the time are irrational. I think the answer is, especially for publicly consequential beliefs: We achieve rationality by implementing rules for the community that make us collectively more rational than any of us are individually. People make up for one anothers biases by being able to criticize them. People air their disagreements, and the person with the strongest position prevails. People subject their beliefs to empirical tests.

Steven Pinker in 1976, when he was an undergraduate at McGill University. From Steven Pinker

Are there aspects of your own life in which youre knowingly irrational? The answer is almost certainly yes. I probably do things that morally I cant justify, like eating meat. I probably take risks that if I were to do the expected-utility calculation could not be justified, like bicycling. If I were to multiply the probability of my being killed by the value placed on my life, it would certainly be less than the same sum for getting my exercise by hiking or swimming. But nonetheless I enjoy bicycling. I try to mitigate the risks and to adjust my behavior to make it more ethically defensible. I have reason to believe at a meta-self-conscious level that whatever adjustments I do make are probably less than what would be optimal.

Do you see any irrational beliefs as useful? Yeah. For example, every time the media blames a fire or a storm on climate change, its a dubious argument in the sense that those are events that belong to weather, not climate. You can never attribute a particular event to a trend. Its also the case, given that there is an availability bias in human cognition, that people tend to be more influenced by images and narratives and anecdotes than trends. If a particular anecdote or event can in the public mind be equated with a trend, and the impression that people get from the flamboyant image gets them to appreciate what in reality is a trend, then I have no problem with using it that way.

What about love? Theres nothing irrational about love. Ultimately our values are neither rational nor irrational. Theyre our values; theyre our goals. David Hume made that point: Theres no rational argument why I should rather be happy than sad or healthy rather than sick. But we have to acknowledge basic human needs. Its a misconception to think that if you are joyful, if you are awe-struck, there is something irrational about it, and if youre rational youve got to be a robot. If youll pardon the expression, thats irrational.

Pinker at M.I.T. in 1991. Puppets figured into his study of language development in children. From Steven Pinker

I dont think Im alone in feeling that rising authoritarianism, the pandemic and the climate crisis, among other things, are signs that were going to hell in a handbasket. Is that irrational of me? Its not irrational to identify genuine threats to our well-being. It is irrational to interpret a number of crises occurring at the same time as signs that were doomed. Its a statistical phenomenon that when events are randomly sprinkled in time they cluster. That sounds paradoxical, but unless you have a nonrandom process that spaced them apart Were going to have a crisis every six months but were never going to have two crises in a month events cluster. Thats what random events will always do.

You mentioned changing social norms. How can we know if the fights happening in academia over free speech which youve experienced firsthand are just the labor pains of new norms? And how do we then judge if those norms are ultimately positive or negative? These fights clearly reflect a new regime of norms. The way we evaluate whether they are truth-promoting or not is twofold. One is by analyzing what they reward, what they punish. Are they specifically designed to reward more accurate beliefs and to marginalize less accurate ones, as, for example, the norms of science ought to do? There are norms in my own field, such as preregistering studies, that did not exist 10 or 12 years ago and that can be justified because we know that the old norms led to error and the new norms reduce errors. Moreover, this isnt just etiquette. You can explain why that norm change is necessary in order to achieve our goal of the truth, whereas other norm changes descend on people like a kind of etiquette and are not scrutinized for their effects on achieving the goal of alignment toward truth. The second part of the answer is, does a community that has those norms tend to say true things or false things? You can contrast the set of norms around Wikipedia on the one hand and Twitter on the other, to take two digital platforms that differ a lot in their commitment to the rules that are implemented in order to steer users toward the truth. Does Wikipedia have a good track record? Its not bad. Its comparable to Britannica. If someone were to do that for Twitter, I think its obvious what the answer would be.

You said we have to look at whether or not new norms are designed to reward more accurate beliefs or marginalize less accurate ones. How does that apply to subjective issues like, for example, ones to do with identity? I guess as with all moral arguments, theres not an objectively correct answer, but there can be matters of consistency with values that everyone holds. If everyone agrees that fairness is a value, that education and health and happiness and long life are values, then you could prosecute moral arguments by saying that a particular position is inconsistent with other values that the arguer may hold. I used this example in Rationality: The English feminist Mary Astell appropriated words from John Locke about how people should not be subjected to the arbitrary will of other people. She said if thats a good argument against autocracy and against slavery, why doesnt everyone hold it with regard to women? Similarly, in the 1960s and 70s, the arguments that people had accepted on racial equality were then extended to gender equality and then to sexual orientation. So in the case of free speech, for example, if you believe that the arguments against slavery in their time and against Jim Crow laws more recently could only have been expressed when people had the freedom to voice unpopular opinions, then you cant now say that free speech is inherently dangerous.

Pinker at a lecture in 1997. Brooks Kraft/Sygma, via Getty Images

I think its fair to say that the scope of acceptable academic perspectives and subject-matter study areas has widened immeasurably over time. People can study a multitude of things today that would in the past never have been admitted into academia. But the popular conception is that academic discourse is narrowing. How real is that concern? Is the evidence for it just anecdotal? Its a pointed question to me because one of my shticks is dont let your head be turned by flagrant examples, look at the overall trends. The answer is yes, it has gotten worse, as best we can tell. If you look at the number of cases that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has to deal with every year of flagrant violations of students or professors right to express their opinions; if you look at attitudes among students, do you think its justifiable to fire a professor who has offensive beliefs? There has been a worsening in the last five years. So it isnt just anecdotes. Although some of the anecdotes are hair-raising. Such as, to take a recent example, the law professor who was investigated for raising the possibility that Covid-19 resulted from a lab accident, which until very recently was considered racist beyond the pale. I hope its not true. But I have to admit that it might be true. We cant call somebody a racist for raising the question. Another thing that we know, no doubt as a consequence of some of these trends, is that confidence in academia is sinking. It is an unfortunate trend because it means that in cases where academics ought to have credibility, where the research is not infected by political correctness, such as climate change, theres a sapping of confidence in the scientific consensus. Given that virtually every climate scientist believes that human activity is warming the planet, how could anyone deny it? The answer is, people dont necessarily believe what scientists say because they correctly sense that within academia a person can get punished for unorthodox beliefs.

Isnt it more likely that skepticism about climate change has to do with bad-faith efforts by corporations or politicians than declining confidence in academics? I think its both. The fact that there are grounds for worrying about groupthink in academia means that those admittedly vested interests can gain too much traction. That is, vested interests can gain credibility if they can point, as they now can, to suppression of debate within academia.

What links do you see between rationality and morality? Hume was probably the first of a series of philosophers to point out that they are not the same. That is, you cant, as the clich goes, get an ought from an is. That is technically narrowly true, but it doesnt go very far. Because as soon as you make the nonrational commitment that well-being is good, health is better than sickness, life is better than death and we care about how others treat us that our fates depend on other peoples behavior once you grant those, a lot follows rationally. Such as that I cant justify treating you in a way that is different from the way I expect you to treat me. Just because there is no logical difference between me and you. So a kind of golden rule, categorical imperative, can be derived rationally from the nonrational positions that I care about my well-being, and that my well-being depends on what you do, and that you can understand me. Now, there can be disagreements. If you believe in an afterlife, for example, you might devalue life on Earth compared with salvation. But to the extent that people do care about life on Earth, certain things do rationally follow.

One of the recurring criticisms of your ideas on progress is that our having an awareness of how much better the situation is for the impoverished today compared with the impoverished of the past doesnt actually make anybodys life better and, in fact, minimizes contemporary suffering. Is there a moral gap there? I think thats a fallacy. It can be true both that there are fewer poor people, fewer oppressed people, fewer victims of violence and that there are still poor people, oppressed people and victims of violence. We want to reduce that suffering as much as possible. The fact that there has been progress helps us identify what drives down poverty and violence and illness. But theres also a moral component, and that is: What actually dislodges us from fatalism? What gives us the gumption to try to reduce war further? Maybe you can eliminate it, or poverty? The United Nations and the World Bank and development experts say: Lets see, weve reduced poverty from 90 percent of humanity to 9 percent. Can we push it to zero? That might seem utopian, but if we got it from 90 to 9, lets try to get it to 6 and then 5 and then 4 and then 3. It gives us the rational reason to believe that it is not utopian, and the knowledge of what we should and what we shouldnt be doing.

Pinker giving a lecture at the British Library in 2011. Nick Cunard/Writer Pictures, via Associated Press

If we agree that well-being is better than its opposite, where does economic equality fit in? Is that a core aspect of well-being? I would say it is not the core aspect, although fairness is. The core aspect is flourishing, having the resources necessary to have a stimulating, healthy life. The fact that Warren Buffett exists by itself doesnt make me any worse off. We should distinguish the mere fact that some people earn more than others from the possibility that they did so by illicit means. Of course, unfairness is morally wrong. But inequality per se?People could disagree. In Enlightenment Now, I cite the old joke from the Soviet Union: The two dirt-poor peasants Igor and Boris are just barely scratching a living out of their tiny plots of land. The only difference being that Boris has a goat and Igor doesnt. Then a fairy appears to Igor one day and says, Ill grant you any wish. And he says, I wish that Boriss goat should die. If you can see the humor in that, then you could perhaps appreciate an argument that equality that simply makes some people worse off and doesnt make anyone better off is a dubious moral good. The more defensible moral good would be raising the bottom rather than reducing the difference between the bottom and the top.

Is it possible that the rising-tide-lifts-all-boats economic argument provides the wealthy with an undue moral cover for the self-interested inequality that their wealth grants them? Oh, absolutely. It is a danger that all democracies have to safeguard against: With wealth comes influence and power, and theres the constant vulnerability that the wealthy will game the rules to favor themselves. Another is related: Given that we have a tax system, its elementary fairness that the rich should pay a greater share, that taxes should be progressive. For the obvious reason that an extra dollar means a lot more to a poor person than a rich person. So it hugely increases aggregate welfare if the rich pay a greater share than the poor. For all the debates in the United States as to whether governments should reduce poverty, should support education, support health, the debate is kind of over. We already do. All affluent societies do. Its easy to be seduced by a kind of radical libertarian argument that the role of government should only be to help enforce contracts and maintain safety and law and order. However appealing that might be in theory, in practice it doesnt exist anywhere. Theres no such thing as a libertarian paradise of an affluent democracy with no extensive social safety net.

Just going back to shifting norms in academia: Does the current atmosphere have any bearing on what youre willing to say in public? It is something that I think about. I manage my controversy portfolio carefully. Partly because, as my late colleague Bob Nozick would say, you dont have to have an opinion on everything.

Says the guy whos written multiple books trying to explain human nature. [Laughs.] Yeah, right. I dont shy away from defending the positions that I think can and ought to be defended while not squandering my credibility by being outrageous for the sake of it. I do defend the abstract principle that people should be able to express opinions that they can defend. In making that argument, it isnt like the classic case of the A.C.L.U.s defending the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie, namely that we should allow crazy and offensive and bizarre beliefs to be expressed because thats what free speech is all about. Which, I actually do believe that. But when people are canceled or punished for expressing beliefs that might very well be true or are not outrageous, are not wild, that they can defend thats the greater danger.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.

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Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong - The New York Times

There have been plenty of supply chain issues over the past year and a half. Concocting strange topics to fight about has not been a struggle. It is, however, becoming more difficult by the day to retain the attention of audiences needed for clicks, ratings, and winning elections. There have been overarching themes: anger over lock-downs and mask mandates; vaccine conspiracy theories; whether or not the person who lost the last presidential election indeed lost. But, underneath those meta-panics lies a constant stream of shorter flash-panics that often cause utter confusion.

The latest of these faux-crises brought a small gathering of Anchorage residents to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial on the Park Strip late last month. The emcee of the rally, entitled Truth in Education, was Roz'lyn Wyche, an Anchorage educator and the vice-president and co-founder of the Anchorage Coalition of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Educators (ACBE), a group committed to [championing] equity in education for communities of color in order to achieve equality.

Wyche knew what she was at the rally to object to, but wasn't sure what circumstances had led her to have to object to it in the first place.

Just like everybody else, I didn't even know there was a thing called 'Critical Race Theory,' Wyche told the small crowd. She had helped organize a rally to promote truth and equity in education, including more perspectives from people of color. Conservative media was trying to make it something distinctly different.

If the reader is unfamiliar with the term Critical Race Theory (CRT), that's because its novelty is what made it so appealing to right wing paranoia manufacturers during the aforementioned pandemic, replete with free time and internet access (for those who can afford it).

That's the position in which Seattle-based filmmaker turned conservative activist, Christopher Rufo, found himself earlier this year. Rufo told The New Yorker's Benjamin Wallace-Wells that he was radicalized after coming across Critical Race Theory texts, in which he found radical roots... [and] often explicitly Marxist themes.

COVID lock-downs afforded Rufo and his followers ample time to find more CRT content objectionable and inevitably decide that it was not a legal philosophical discussion, but anti-American curricula invading public K-12 schools and indoctrinating students. Soon, the internet brush fire was sweeping through the conservative ecosphere, percolating to cable news, before landing in local school board and city council meetings including in Alaska, where conservative blogs took Rufo's mental gymnastics and did what they generally do with those sorts of things.

Educators are being asked to pledge to teach what they deem is necessary regardless of any laws to the contrary, one such local blog opined, sans evidence, in advance of the August 28 rally. The blog called out Wyche by name (the comments section did much worse), in a post titled Activist Anchorage Educators to Rally in Support of Teaching Critical Race Theory.

NEA-Alaska president Tom Klaameyer

Back on the Park Strip, NEA-Alaska president Tom Klaameyer repudiated the claim: No school district in Alaska is teaching Critical Race Theory. NEA-Alaska is opposed to teaching Critical Race Theory in K-12 public schools. Klaameyer said he was frustrated having to even talk on the subject. CRT wasn't even on my radar.... I don't know anyone that even believes it ought to be taught in K-12 schools.

CRT is a world removed from the bogeyman it's being sold as, but it's definitely a real, legal scholarship. In the words of leading scholar Kimberl Crenshaw, CRT was formed to [challenge] the ways in which race and racial power are constructed and represented in American legal culture and, more generally, in American society as a whole. And while Crenshaw self-describes CRT as a race-conscious intervention on the left, developed mostly by liberal academics hailing from Ivy League schools, it is more a critique of liberal legal philosophy ranging from Brown v. Board through to today (the initial writings on the topic first appeared in the 1970s and '80s).

That CRT was so obscure (until it was appropriated and redefined) made it the perfect fodder for fear-peddlers in search of rage-bait. They needed something new, because the other trends (Dr. Seuss, Potato Head, the Muppets) were succumbing to flagging ratings. Rufo explained in his interview with The New Yorker that terms like wokeness, cancel culture, and political correctness had come to be viewed as too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. Critical race theory is the perfect villain[.] CRT was employed because its obscurity could be framed as something, as Rufo put it, hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. A catch-all with a fresh canvas.

Rufo didn't strike gold, but he found a lot of buyers content with his pyrite. In the short time since CRT's re-branding, fourteen states have passed racial and gender equity prohibitions into law, with at least ten more states entertaining proposals including a bill prefiled by Rep. Tom McKay (R-Anchorage) in the Alaska State House.

Lost in the manic proxy war are the students striving access to an honest account of American history. The cacophony decrying CRT as an anti-American reformation of education where white people are cast as an evil monolith belies the fact that students have been deprived of an honest depiction of the uglier parts of American history; slavery, the genocide of First Nation peoples, the Fugitive Slave Act, Jim Crow, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement and its backlash(es), to name a few. Honestly, how many readers knew about the Tulsa Massacre before HBO's The Watchmen hit?

As more and more people realize that the truth isn't being told in education, they want to make way for a change, Krissia Tuzroyluk, an Iupiaq high school senior from Point Hope, said. It should be a right for students to learn the truth. Yet, this is threatened by policy and lawmakers. And some are trying to keep teachers from teaching diverse topics and anti-racist topics. And it's what we see here in Alaska, too. The classroom should be a safe space where students learn the truth.

We have the ability to hold [this] nation accountable as we hold ourselves accountable with that eternal call for improvement, George Martinez, former Anchorage mayoral candidate and Director of Leadership and Youth Programs at the Alaska Humanities Forum, added. Asking those difficult questions, confronting the ugly historical facts, but moving forward embraced in perpetual hope that, on the other side of the pain, can come reconciliation, healing, and transformation.

There is no reconciliation without understanding history including the difficult parts and confronting it. That is what the Truth in Education rally, and the movement for a more fair, just, and diverse depiction of history as taught in schools is fundamentally about.

Our schools should be safe havens of exploration, free-thinking, creativity, and growth. And we don't avoid controversial topics just because they're controversial, Klaameyer said. We have an obligation to teach our students the unvarnished truth about the world around them so that they can understand it and successfully find their place within it.

Read more here:

Critical Race Theory: The Right's New Manic Proxy War and the Anchorage Group Fighting Back - Anchorage Press

Jamiel Law for BuzzFeed News

In celebration of the impending release of her first single, "Drivers License," in January, Olivia Rodrigo held an Instagram Live party. Her excitement was palpable as she realized her song had already become available to people on Spotify; from there, she spoke about myriad topics, including her new music video and even dirty makeup brushes. But for some viewers, it wasnt what she was saying that attracted their attention so much as how she was saying it.

I be trending! she announced in shock at one point. Im emotional AF, she said later.

When clips from the livestream resurfaced in July, people on social media criticized Rodrigo, saying that she was appropriating language used primarily by Black people and attempting to talk in a blaccent.

And shes far from the only person to be accused of Black cultural appropriation recently. Singer-songwriter Camila Cabello, who has received backlash for racist Tumblr posts she reblogged as a teenager and for using the n-word, published and deleted a tweet in late July that was widely mocked for its nonsensical grammar. These incidents echo a long-standing trend that is probably best exemplified by Bhad Bhabie, who first went viral after appearing on a 2016 episode of Dr. Phil that featured her speaking in an often incomprehensible accent of her own. When Dr. Phil himself asked Bhad Bhabie, who was 13 at the time and whose real name is Danielle Bregoli, whether she was even speaking English, she proudly proclaimed that her accent came from the streets while wearing long press-on coffin nails and gold bamboo hoop earrings.

By making the effort to uncover somethings origins, we make a strong statement: Black culture is not deserving of mockery or appropriation it demands respect.

It was a couple of minutes later in the segment, when Bhad Bhabie expressed disdain for the members of the audience who were laughing at her, that she let loose the catchphrase Cash me ousside, howbow dah?! Within six months of the episode airing, a clip featuring Bhad Bhabies taunt blew up on social media. In 2017, she debuted as a rapper with the single These Heaux and signed a deal with Atlantic Records under her stage name.

The specific way Bhad Bhabies words were transliterated on the internet was meant to simultaneously replicate and mock her undoubtedly fake/performative accent. (She claims she grew up in the hood, although her mother does not share the same mannerisms.) But non-Black people are constantly using either real or imagined proximity to Black Americans and their cultures in an attempt to seem cool, sexy, and threatening in equal measure and in the case of Bhad Bhabie and other stars like Awkwafina, theyre profiting off it without having to deal with the legacies of racist segregation, redlining, overpolicing, and disinvestment in the same ways Black people do.

Its the vibrancy and authenticity of Black culture that attracts appropriators, who, ironically, dilute those very same qualities. Black communities around the country are far from monolithic, but the stereotypes that fuel cultural appropriation assume otherwise. For example, while Black Americans have been affected by poverty in a variety of ways, the cultural mainstays of many urban, working-poor Black people (those from the streets, as Bhad Bhabie put it) are considered the model for understanding Black American communities as a whole. Those mainstays include the long acrylic nails and bamboo earrings Bhad Bhabie wore in her Dr. Phil appearance and the blaccent that she, Cabello, and Rodrigo have attempted. These privileged young women reach for caricatures of low-wage Black workers when they desire edgy yet superficial makeovers.

When it comes to language appropriation, specifically, you dont have to look for very long on social media to find examples of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, being used in out-of-touch or even downright inaccurate contexts because someone outside Black American communities decided to run with it (as Cabello proves). Also known historically as Ebonics, AAVE is the unique dialect often spoken by the descendants of Africans who were enslaved in the US. Black immigrants often assimilate and use it too, bringing new linguistic traits with them. AAVE consists of both singular phrases and unique grammatical structures that make it comparable to the language spoken by the Gullah Geechee in the Carolinas, Florida, and Georgia, the Creole from Haiti, and the patois spoken in countries such as Barbados and Jamaica (and unfortunately appropriated by Chet Hanks). AAVE is a living language that has evolved over centuries, but the ubiquity of the internet has made many aspects of the dialect more accessible and encouraged others to adopt it for their own use. And it has proven to be extremely popular.

But when media outlets including BuzzFeed and individuals who discuss memes and popular culture reproduce instances of Black American cultural appropriation, they lend them more credibility. On fleek, AF (as fuck), savage, shade, sip/spill the tea, and woke are all examples of AAVE that have crept into wider public vernacular upon being championed by non-Black people. The BuzzFeed Style Guide includes entries for many of these slang terms including cash me ousside, howbow dah because it still appears in quotes and critical contexts and there exists a question of whether we should note their AAVE origins when they come up in a story. Doing so would help put concepts in their proper context and make it more difficult for culture vultures to appropriate with impunity.

From left: Melissa Villaseor, host Elon Musk, Ego Nwodim, Heidi Gardner, Mikey Day, Kate McKinnon, and Bowen Yang take a selfie during the "Gen Z Hospital" sketch on Saturday Night Live on May 8, 2021.

Heres a common scenario that plays out on social media: Non-Black people think theyve found a new phrase, custom, or fashion trend, only for Black people to point out that it is actually a deep-rooted cultural practice. For example, AAVE terms are played for laughs as being the work of ridiculous and nonsensical kids in SNLs Gen Z Hospital sketch, which aired this spring. Black Twitter users were quick to make their annoyance with the sketch known. (Michael Che, the Black writer of the sketch, said he was baffled by the controversy because he had never heard of AAVE; critics on social media said this was disingenuous, as he surely had heard of and used Ebonics.) Similarly, AAVE terms and grammatical structures have also been falsely attributed to millennials, college students, fandoms, and the Very Online, with no consideration given to the race of people using them.

References like these lead to a cycle of the public at large erasing Black people from their own culture and getting shamed for it. Sometimes, these callouts lead to a lasting awareness that prevents someone from making a similar mistake in the future, but that doesnt change the fact that denouncing a popular influencer, media outlet, or viral tweet still takes a huge toll on Black peoples mental health.

While there are people of all races who believe that criticizing cultural appropriation is pointless, maybe even harmful, it is important to differentiate between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange. Non-Black people who grow up in communities alongside Black people often use AAVE in their daily lives without much pushback. Its when AAVE is used exploitatively i.e., without active collaboration with Black people that it becomes a problem. In an ideal world, non-Black people would engage meaningfully with Black communities on a consistent basis, allowing them to recognize language that was invented by Black people before taking credit for or incorrectly using terminology (and other products of Black culture). If, for whatever reason, that isnt possible, then poring over cultural analysis by Black journalists and other writers, such as this recent Wired piece on the history of Black Twitter by Jason Parham, is the natural next step before one decides whether to incorporate Black language into their personal lexicon.

The terms cancel and woke, for example, having been stripped of their original, more nuanced meanings among Black people, have illuminated how the internet and social media can both oppress and empower marginalized groups.

I think of Peaches Monroee, who created on fleek with that viral Vine, April Reign, a diversity and inclusion advocate who created the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, told Wired. Theres so many examples of how Black Twitter has been undermonetized for years, and yet others have been able to make entire careers off of our brilliance.

And Black American culture is an important aspect of news coverage beyond just the internet memes. Black American music, language, and ideas underpin many of the USs oldest institutions and provide a vital frame of reference for both the past and present. The terms cancel and woke, for example, having been stripped of their original, more nuanced meanings among Black people, have illuminated how the internet and social media can both oppress and empower marginalized groups. But the only way that this insight can receive proper consideration is by ensuring that Black Americans and their influence are not erased.

When we divorce language from its context, we risk further oppressing not only Black people but also the communities they intersect with, including other people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. By making the effort to uncover somethings origins, we make a strong statement: Black culture is not deserving of mockery or appropriation it demands respect.

And we show respect to Black culture when we choose to spend time searching social media or the wider internet before drawing conclusions about cultural content we are unfamiliar with. This kind of preliminary research would uncover, for example, the clear association between woke and Black people, forcing conservatives and other dishonest actors to at least say the quiet part out loud that an attack on liberal wokeness is really just a way to avoid being held accountable for oppression la political correctness before it. In the same vein, Bhad Bhabies own admission that her accent came from the streets makes it clear how much AAVE has influenced her; likewise, it helps socially conscious people think twice about mocking her speech if their punchline is still ultimately Black people dont know how to speak English.

Mocking her and other appropriators for getting the totally valid dialect wrong, though, should be fair game. AAVE has rules like any other dialect or language, as linguists John Rickford and Russell Rickford argue in their 2001 article for Language Review, The Ubiquity of Ebonics:

Consider grammar. In the movie [The Original Kings of Comedy], the Kings mark tense and aspect when and how events occur with the tools of black talk. They place invariant be before verbs for frequent or habitual actions (they songs be havin a cause), and use done for completed actions (you done missed it), and be done for future perfect or hypothetical events (lightning be done struck my house). And they frequently delete is and are where Standard English requires it (Tiger ___ my cousin we __ confrontational).

Moreover, suggesting, as some do, that [Black people] abandon [Ebonics] and cleave only to Standard English is like proposing that we play only the white keys of a piano, they conclude. The fact is that for many of our most beautiful melodies, we need both the white keys and the black.

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So Much Modern Slang Is AAVE. Heres How Language Appropriation Erases The Influence Of Black Culture. - BuzzFeed News

Lauding Lapid

Forgoing the chance of being PM first did not show generosity Naftali Bennett would not have joined him otherwise. Similarly, taking less than his proportionate share of ministers was not due to nobility and leadership since he created a bloated cabinet, contrary to all his promises. A truly noble leader would have called the heads of the other seven parties together and said if any one of them insisted on more than their proportionate share, there would be no government.

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We also learned this week that Lapid wanted to recall Tzipi Hotovely from her London ambassadorship after only one year in order to appoint Yael German, one of his cronies. What sense is there in bringing back an ambassador after only one year? She has just begun to learn her job, create relationships with her staff and learn their strengths and weaknesses, make contacts and get to know key British politicians and civil servants and establish friendships with useful foreign ambassadors. Instead of starting to get value from Hotovely, he wanted to bring in one of his own supporters an absolute newcomer to international diplomacy to boot and waste another year while she learned the job? Lapid promised that he would provide sensible government, not just to provide jobs for the boys in order to maintain their loyalty, but it seems to me his promises are as useless as those of the other politicians he scorned.

Not my idea of person of the year!

ALAN HALIBARDBeit Shemesh

Some summit!

As further proof of their near-lunatic disconnect from reality, the Cairo Summit (Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority) called for the quartet (UN, EU, Russia and the US) to be the main broker for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks (Cairo Summit calls on Quartet, not US, to lead Israeli-Palestinian talks, September 2).

Why Israel would agree to the UN and the EU two well-known anti-Israeli centers of disinformation defies rationality. The Cairo Summit left out the Arab League and Iran as other worthy candidates.

One wonders whether the Cairo Summit leaders purposely adopt a call that even furthers the possibility of promoting peace or they do it out of plain stupidity?

YIGAL HOROWITZ, PHDBeersheba

Who was missing from this summit? Egypts Abdel Fattah al-Sissi hosted King Abdullah II of Jordan and the Palestinian Authoritys Mahmoud Abbas. They forgot to include Israel. Why?

It would have been meaningful for the four to talk to each other and exchange ideas and explore whether they can have peace talks and what those negotiations might look like.

Instead, it was just a repeat of the same old Arab ruse to get to the next step in the plan to destroy the Jewish state.

Abbas wants to go back in time and convert the 1949 temporary armistice lines into borders, and for east Jerusalem to become the capital of Palestine. Thats exactly what was offered by Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at the Camp David summit in 2000, with minor changes. Yasser Arafat, you remember, refused it and launched the Second Intifada, which resulted in 2,000 Israelis being murdered. The intifada destroyed cooperation and forced Israel be build security barriers and checkpoints. Israel is not looking for a rehash.

The parameters have since changed. Israel turned Gaza, Jew-free, over to the PA. Hamas emerged and launched a reign of terror against Israel, Egypt and the PA.

The three leaders suggested an international conference to gang up on Israel. Israel, with 50 years UN experience, is not that nave.

The Arab states that have relations with Israel could provide a platform for peace talks. Last years American Peace to Prosperity plan could be Israel starting position.

I doubt Abbas wants peace. The status quo is lucrative, and the real goal is from the river to the sea. So-called summits like this do nothing to disabuse him of his illusions.

LEN BENNETTOttawa, On. Canada

We must admit Mahmoud Abbas told the truth. He said he would never make any concessions to Israel and he hasnt. He is still demanding a state, on the 1949 armistice lines (1967 borders) with eastern Jerusalem as its capital and expecting Israel to live up to proposals that he, Yasser Arafat and the Arab League flatly rejected years ago. He apparently doesnt accept the famous definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.

TOBY F. BLOCKAtlanta, GA

He who arises to kill you

The tragic and unnecessary death of St. Sgt Barel Shmueli (zl) was not the fault of the particular army unit where he served, nor of its commanders (Border policeman dies from Gaza riot shooting injury, August 30). It is a direct result of the policy of containment another aspect of political correctness a policy that refuses to declare to the Israeli public and the world at large, that the rioters at our southern border aim to kill all Israelis and drive them into the sea, and they make no secret about it.

The Midrash (on The Book of Numbers 25) decrees, He who arises to kill you, wake up early and kill him first. In Black September 51 years ago, the Jordanians forever squashed the Palestinian uprising against the Hashemite Kingdom. King Hussein ordered his troops to kill the entire front line of Palestinians and shell their concentrations in the Jordanian cities. There has never been any trouble from the Palestinian majority of the Jordanian population since that day.

When will we learn that containment, compromise and goodwill gestures are interpreted as weaknesses to be exploited? Former chief of staff Rafael Eitan (Raful) said, No terrorist should be allowed to leave the location of his terrorist act alive. Everybody agreed except the government, which was too scared of what would the world think.

The clear directive needs to be given by the defense minister to the chief of staff and thence down through the ranks: anyone who approaches within 20 meters of the border fence should be shot and not necessarily just in the legs.

LAURENCE BECKERJerusalem

Weight a minute

Ancient weight used to cheat found in Jerusalem (September 3) is probably fake news. Among other possibilities, this might be a case where the Judean weight maker took his seven-gera weight to check it against the set of master weights housed in the Holy Temple complex and found it to be lacking in weight, and out of pious fulfillment of the injunction to have only honest weights, decided to not finish marking the weight and either discarded it or dropped it and didnt bother to retrieve it because it was useless.

A two-gera weight back in the day was both exceptionally rare and very tiny; any moron in the shuk would know that a 14mm x 12mm stone weight was not a two-gera weight, just as anyone today would know that a silver dollar is not a dime.

Before racing to capture headlines to blacken the name of Israel, perhaps our eminent scholars, on the eve of Judgement Day, rather than disseminating fake news, could take a breath and explore alternative possibilities that cause kiddush Hashem (sanctifying Gods name) and not Chillul Hashem (Desecrating Gods name.)

REUVEN PRAGERBeged Ivri

Big omit in the obit

It is surprising and sad that the Jerusalem Posts obituary on Mikis Theodorakis (Zorba the Greek composer dies, September 3) omits the fact that the renowned composer openly admitted that he was anti-Israel and antisemitic.

He called Jews the root of evil, and, of course, that Jews control the worlds banks and media. The JPost even reported this in its February 15, 2011 edition. Such an oversight is a disappointing reflection on the papers editorial and institutional memory.

MOSHE R. MANHEIMRehovot

Straight talk

Any communication with him should laser-focus on the above.

DAVID BEDEINDirector, Center for Near East Policy Research

What is Blinken thinkin?

Regarding Repatriating Israeli hostages is a basic humanitarian matter (September 2), US Secretary of State Antony Blinken obviously feels that Jews are not particularly deserving of humanitarian consideration such as the return of two Israeli citizens being held for no reason, and the bodies of the soldiers that were snatched by terrorists and are being held to inflict even more suffering on their families.

I wonder how that would have played out if the Taliban had snatched the bodies of American soldiers.

Thank you Alan Baker for a great op-ed.

FREYA BINENFELDPetah Tikva

Terrible taxes

The plan proposed by Science and Technology Minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen to bring foreign workers for the hi-tech industry (Hi-tech job openings rise 300% as investments soar. August 30) makes no sense when thousands of Israelis are kept exiled in USA by draconian Israeli tax laws that make it impossible for them to come home. It is irresponsible for the Israeli government to invest in attracting foreigners and olim while abandoning thousands of Israeli families anxious to come home who cannot afford to pay Israeli taxes on top of the US taxes that they pay.

What an enormous loss of creative talent stranded abroad who would generate far more tax income if they returned to work in Israel. Israel can only benefit by changing such a draconian law so that our children and grandchildren can come back home.

A case study of one of the huge number of Israeli families who cannot afford to come back home is my sabra son and his sabra wife. Considering the high cost of living and exorbitant tuition for Jewish day school for their five children in USA, they have no way to pay thousands of dollars in the double taxation.

My son earned his B.A., M.A., and M.B.A. with highest honors at IDC Herzliya and worked there as administrator of international programs. He then become director of digital insights at a hi-tech firm in Tel Aviv before accepting a position as COO of a company in Florida.

His wife earned her Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Bar-Ilan University with honors and completed her postdoctoral research in a project for IDF. She is now professor of chemistry at a Florida university.

Before Minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen imports foreign workers, she should have self-defeating tax laws changed so that talented Israelis can afford to come home.

PROF. MENAHEM (MEL) ALEXENBERGRaanana

Slow Joe is no dynamo

Regarding Will Biden survive Afghanistan withdrawal? (September 3), US President Joe Biden was elected as a result of a well-orchestrated sales job perpetrated on the American people by a Democrat Party that knew about his incompetence and lack of loyalty to the truth and by the complicit media.

Much is at stake for us here in Israel. I believe Biden has a dangerous character flaw: he is an unabashed liar, without a conscience. He had to drop out of the 1988 presidential primaries because he got caught plagiarizing speeches and falsifying his resume. Never having had to meet the challenges of a real job, he tries to compensate for his inadequacies by making up stories to make himself appear more significant and tough.

Unfortunately, his self-aggrandizement has not been limited to falsely promoting his own image. For four decades he has used his office to sell political influence and make millions of dollars for himself, his son Hunter and his brother and sister.

As we know from his own words from his conversation with the former Afghan president Biden is concerned about optics, not substance, consequences be damned. His narcissistic hasty strategy resulted in surrendering Afghanistan to the Taliban, turning his back on countless Americans and allies stranded there and creating a safe-haven for terrorists armed with US weaponry who will endanger the entire world. He wanted to be able to announce to the world on September 11 that he defied the advice of his military and intelligence communities, and singlehandedly ended a 20-year engagement in Afghanistan. As a result of his decisions, hundreds of innocent people have died and others continue to be killed.

Far from being an amusing and harmless old man, he can continue on a path of destruction both in the US and abroad. At home, he knowingly violates federal immigration law by allowing millions of unvetted COVID-infected illegals stream across the US southern border. He divides Americans between white oppressors and the oppressed people of color, endorses a radical socialist agenda, is spending trillions of future tax-payers dollars on Leftist causes, and is creating runaway inflation that can destroy much of the middle class and impoverish American workers for generations to come.

No longer able to depend on the US as a moral force, Israel will be increasingly vulnerable to terrorist aggression and increasing Jew-hatred here and abroad. We must support his removal and the removal of his amateur advisers before they complete the destruction and reach the point of no return.

STEVEN HABERFELDNahariya

China challenge

Regarding The China conundrum (September 3), it was with some trepidation and disappointment that I note that former prime minister Ehud Olmert has renewed his weekly half-page column in The Jerusalem Post, but I was at least somewhat relieved to see that his piece for once was not riddled with unhinged insults against a certain recent prime minister whose name he didnt even mention once.

It should be pointed out Olmerts argument that we should be open to dealing with China is defeatist in that 1) Olmert never once mentions Chinas consistent hostile anti-Israel stance in international bodies and 2) apparently it does not even occur to Olmert to suggest we show enough self-respect to push back on this.

IRA LEVINSONNetanya

Kelly Alkhouli asks, Will China join Afghanistans empire graveyard? (September 5). I doubt that it will. China always used its dual strategy of political indoctrination and state-driven demographic change in the Xinjiang region in its war on terror. This time will be no different. China will never invade Afghanistan or send troops into its neighbor, but will definitely intensify its suppression of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other largely Muslim minorities through rape, forced labor, forced abortions and sterilization, organ harvesting, erasure of Uighurs cultural identity, Muslim traditions and Turkic language, coercive assimilations, torture and digital and human surveillance. I am afraid that the world will again fail to save another indigenous people from the perils of genocide and crimes against humanity.

DR. MUNJED FARID AL QUTOBLondon, United Kingdom

More here:

Letters to the Editor September 5, 2021: From US to Israeli politics - The Jerusalem Post

There is a time and place for pithy remarks, sarcasm, and even bad jokes. OK, well maybe there is never a good time for bad jokes, but pithy remarks and sarcasm, absolutely.

The world has been dealing us some very serious situations. There are many among us who deal with serious situations through humor. Whether we are trying to mask our own fears or concerns, and/or we are trying to lighten a mood for others around us, the smart play is to read the room first. Many a poorly timed great joke or spontaneous one-liner has been met with incredulity and awkward silence.

Many of us have found ourselves apologizing once we realized the impact that our comment or joke had on those around us. Having been that person who carelessly and thoughtlessly made a bad choice of words, and did so more than once, I know firsthand what it feels like to wish I could immediately take back what I had said.

Now I am not referring to political correctness where some of us get easily offended by the slightest offhanded remark or jab. I will reserve that for another column. What I am referring to here is having situational awareness and sensitivity to what is going on around us at any given moment.

In our haste we may think that something is incredibly funny, or harmless when it first pops into our head, not pausing to try and appreciate how it will be received by others. Even when we have the very best of intentions, poor timing coupled with even worse content could end up as a complete misfire.

You may feel like this is common sense. Maybe it is, let's also remember that common sense isn't always common practice. Again, learning this the hard way, I have taught myself to apply the 30-second rule. Instead of focusing on being quick with a joke or punch line, I hesitate to make sure that what I am about to say wouldn't be insulting or hurtful to those around me.

By the way, there is a difference between being offended and being insulted or hurt. If we were to worry about offending others each time we spoke, well we just might not speak at all anymore. We could all use a little adjustment to our offended meter, recognizing that all our differences and differences of opinion are what keep things fun and interesting. Just imagine if we all thought the same, looked the same, acted the same in every situation, how boring would that be?

Insulting or hurting others through our words is something completely different. It's one thing if our poorly timed attempt at humor, lightening the mood, or trying to comfort someone else is done with the very best of intentions and falls flat. When that is the case, we can fix it by practicing the 30-second rule, pausing before we speak. However, when we know that what we are about to say could potentially be a mic drop moment for all the wrong reasons, that is when it becomes a problem.

Situational awareness coupled with proper etiquette is always seen as an elegant solution. I think we still live in a country that honors free speech. Although our speech may be, it is incumbent upon as humans that coexist with one another to think before we speak, especially in moments where we have a knee-jerk reaction to shoot from the hip. And to increase our chances of providing an elegant solution and speaking the right words at the right time, maybe we can build or rebuild our own go-to word bank filled with words such as kindness, gentleness, grace, compassion, comfort, love and forgiveness.

Have you experienced a poorly timed joke or note of sarcasm? Have you ever uttered words at the wrong moment that you wish you could take back? I would love to hear your story at mnorton@tramazing.com, and when we can remember to pause and think before we speak, it really will be a better than good year.

Michael Norton is the grateful CEO of Tramazing.com, a personal and professional coach, and a consultant, trainer, encourager and motivator to businesses of all sizes.

Originally posted here:

Opinion: The elegant solution is thinking before speaking - Arvada Press

These days, movies and TV show episodes are often pulled from streaming services or TV networks when their content is seen as harmful or insensitive. Comedy Central recently sparked controversy by removing an episode of The Office from its rotation during a weekend marathon. Many fans were upset that the episode was left out. Some felt that it was due to cancel culture and that people were missing the point of the episode.

Newsweek reports that Comedy Central left out the episode Diversity Day during a weekend start-to-end marathon of The Office. In the episode, a representative from Diversity Today holds a meeting at the office due to Michaels frequent recitations of one of Chris Rocks stand-up routines.

Michael, in turn, holds his own diversity training. He guides his employees in a ridiculous exercise where they tape index cards labeled with different ethnicities to their foreheads. As usual, Michael is wildly inappropriate in this episode. He even does an impression thats so offensive it earns him a slap in the face from Kelly Kapoor.

Many fans were upset that Comedy Central omitted Diversity Day. They felt that canceling the episode was missing its whole point. One fan tweeted, Diversity Day is one of my favorite episodes. The entire show is based on a character who is oblivious to political correctness of any sort. Another fan commented, You cannot cancel The Office Diversity Day episode the whole point is to mock the companies that make sy attempts to boost diversity.

RELATED: The Office: Steve Carell Says Michael Scott Is a Pure Character for 1 Reason

Steve Carells character Michael Scott is notoriously ignorant and offensive. Arguably, thats the whole point. Still, even Carell doubts that a show like The Office could be made today. The climates different. I mean, the whole idea of that character, Michael Scott, so much of it was predicated on inappropriate behavior, he told Esquire. I mean, hes certainly not a model boss. A lot of what is depicted on that show is completely wrong-minded. Thats the point, you know? But I dont know how that would fly now.

Carell continued to explain why The Office wouldnt work today. Theres a very high awareness of offensive things todaywhich is good, for sure, he told the outlet. But at the same time, when you take a character like that too literally, it doesnt really work.

Its important to note that Comedy Central has not confirmed that they purposefully left out Diversity Day due to pressure from cancel culture. As Snopes points out, Diversity Day is not the only episode that gets skipped when Comedy Central plays marathons of The Office. For example, holiday episodes are often left out of the lineup. The outlet proposes that although its a stretch, perhaps the network mistook Diversity Day as a holiday episode.

TV networks have removed episodes from other popular comedy shows as well. Newsweek reports that Comedy Central has stopped showing specific episodes from both Seinfeld and South Park. Disney+ has also removed movies like Dumbo,Peter Pan,Swiss Family Robinson, andThe Aristocats from their Kids Profile. The platform explained that they did this because young children might not be able to read the content advisories added to these movies at the beginning of the film.

For now, Diversity Day is still available on the streaming service Peacock TV.

RELATED: The Office Blackface Scene Gets Edited Out for Netflix and Other Streaming Platforms

Continue reading here:

Comedy Central Removed This Episode of 'The Office' From Its Lineup - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

You've seen them on Twitter: the videos of Taliban fighters struggling to understand how gym equipment works, enjoying a pirate ship amusement park ride, and driving dodgems and riding carousel horses.

Many of the videos have gained millions of views and thousands of sharesa testament to the oddity of seeing members of a proscribed terrorist group that have taken control of a country of 38 million people in a matter of weeks acting like buffoons.

While it's highly unlikely these videos have been deliberately seeded by the Talibanwho are more focused at present on selling themselves as compassionate, competent leaders in waiting for Afghanistanthey do help the terrorist group in their attempt to rebrand as Taliban 2.0.

"I'm minded to think back to a piece of research my colleague was involved in where they looked at ISIS magazines on Twitter," says Joe Whittaker, lecturer in cyber threats at Swansea University, whose research monitors how ISIS uses the internet. "They found the people trying to deliberately spread propaganda with the intention of radicalizing or recruiting was vastly outweighed by what you might call 'useful idiots' with a negative tagline just spraying it around social media."

The worry, says Whittaker, is that "people think they're being funny and it may have a humanizing effect."

Certainly, posts revolving around the 'Taliban are just like us' premise are viral catnip. One image of Taliban fighters eating ice cream shared on Twitter by journalist Sami Yousafzai received 8.4 million impressions in a little over a week. As one commenter noted, "sadly the posts of their war crimes didn't get 1/100th as much".

Whittaker points out that the Taliban has a difficult branding exercise to carry out entirely besides being mocked by online posters poking fun at their workout technique. "They've got to sell two very different messages to two different audiences," he says. They have to try and convince the west and anyone who may at a future point want to engage in military actions or sanctions that they are a changed group, willing to respect human rights and women's place in society. Yet to the jihadist world they're trying to sell that this is a country run under sharia law. "You see that in their messaging: they'll say things like: 'Women have a place in society', then caveat it with 'in line with sharia law'," says Whittaker.

"Clearly, being the incompetent boob or dancing to musicwhich is a no-no in a jihadist groupcan be contrary to the message they want the jihadist world to see, but could potentially be useful to what they want the west to see," he adds. While he doesn't believe they're deliberately seeding meme-ready videos and photos designed to make them look incompetent or less dangerous than they actually are, their existence online and half-life on social media does more good to them than harm by downplaying their risk to international order. And we could be helping that by prolonging its existence.

The Taliban have been the subject of memes that promote their prowess on English language social media through the Taliban Chad meme: a character who is happy living outside of western norms, owning guns, marrying multiple women and ignoring political correctness. "He's not burdened by ideals of 'Western democracy'", says Idil Galip, who studies memes at the University of Edinburgh, and runs the Meme Studies Research Network. "This is a pretty deliberate use of the Taliban."

But the co-opting of the Taliban's jubilant videos celebrating its routing of the allied forces in Afghanistan is something different, she says. "You have these videos which are shared indiscriminately, by people who are not concerned by making an intentional political point. The videos are sort of meaningless and hyperreal, terrorists eating ice cream, terrorists on a merry go-round, terrorists with funny voices."

Some of them are legitimate videos, taken in Afghanistan in the last few weeks and months. Others are categorically not: a video purporting to be Taliban fighters celebrating by dancing to music was fact-checked as a fraud. Others still have an uncertain provenance: one showing men crashing bobsleds into each other, tumbling out of the cart, hasn't been categorically proven or disproven to be legitimate.

In a way it doesn't matter. The absurdity behind the legitimate, real videos is almost unreal anyway. Which is the point, says Hussein Kesvani, author of Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims, who is studying how fringe communities communicate online at University College London. "The people who are sharing these memes and are fascinated by them grew up in the shadow of the war on terror," he says. "They can see the horrific effect of what's happened, and what's going to happen now. You've got this end of this war that defined a generation and a generation of politics, but ended catastrophically. How do you process something like that?"

The answer, Kesvani says, is humor. "Not just through humor but absurd humor. It's like processing a trauma."

There is something absurd about the peril in which Afghanistan now lies. The gym video that went viral and kickstarted the posting of such absurd videos highlights that most clearly. "It showed people who don't know how to lift, and aren't particularly strong, but could defeat the U.S. army and U.S.-trained army in record time. It was this unintended satire of what U.S. military power presented itself as being."

The videos, then, are "a way of reflecting on western imperialist hubris," says Kesvani. Yet by making the Taliban the butt of the joke, we run the risk of downplaying how much of a headache their ascendancy could cause for the future of the region, and the rest of the world. "The danger perhaps is in reframing the Taliban as these oafish group of normal guys who just happened to win unexpectedly against American military forces," he says.

Sadly, there are several historical precedents for memeifying individuals or groups to the extent that their dangers are downplayed. U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson practically designed a photocall around a zipline to become a meme in 2012. He became prime minister five years later off the back of his larger-than-life persona, and promptly delivered a no-deal Brexit and bungled the U.K.'s coronavirus response. 132,000 people have died. Donald Trump followed a similar playbook, with similar results. And in 2015, John Magufuli became president of Tanzania and the butt of East African Twitter because of his scything economic cuts. Two years on from #Whatwouldmagufulido, he turned on the country's LGBTQ community.

The outlook in Afghanistan could be equally grim as that country's new leaders become the internet's latest meme, fears Kesvani. "This is a group that has been around a very long time that has been documented for a very long time," he says. "It's like this willful ignorance of what is going to happen to that country and what is going to happen to those people."

More:

How viral memes did the Taliban's work of helping them rebrand - Business Insider

Some people say that life is too short, but comedian Chelsea Handler declares that its too long.

She blames annoying people for making her existence tedious:

Like folks who say anyways.

Its not a word.

And room service attendants who serve chicken fingers with a knife and fork.

Its shaming.

Then, there are the guys who show up for a date wearing flip flops with jewelry, order an ahi tuna sandwich for breakfast and ask her to name her top 10 favorite bands.

These are all observations that cause Handler to cringe and her fan base to laugh, and the kinds of subjects she tackles on her Vaccinated and Horny Tour.

For those who will miss her sold-out Sunday show at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay, theres also her HBO Max special, Evolution, her new book, Life Will be the Death of Me and You Too! and her weekly advice podcast, Dear Chelsea, distributed by the iHeart Radio Podcast Network.

Handler prepared material for The HBO Max special by performing her stand-up comedy in small clubs on the East Coast.

The special was just over an hour and I had to economize my time, Handler says.

So, a lot of what was left out was repurposed in the new show Im currently touring with. I talk a lot about my dogs and their interest in getting a restraining order against me. They think my housekeeper is their adoptive mother and Im just an au pair who roams through the house every couple of weeks.

Comedy is a serious business, a mostly-male art form often inspired by tragedy or a sense of outrage. Early notable female comedians such as Lucille Ball, Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr got laughs with self-deprecating humor or narratives about husbands and family life.

But Handler is one of the contemporary female comics who explores a wider realm of topics and mediums. She is bawdy and unrestrained about womens sexuality, racism, drugs and social issues. More than once, she has had to submit a public apology for remarks that crossed the political correctness line.

While that hasnt made a difference in her success, it makes writing comedy a medium that can expose social and political inconsistencies with humor more challenging.

We arent allowed to say what we want, Handler says. Its whatever. I dont subscribe to the theory of we cant say anything. You can say a lot and be very clever about it, so why not try?

This image released by HBO Max shows Chelsea Hander during her comedy special Chelsea Handler: Evolution.

(Associated Press)

Handler has made a career of trying. She has worked as a producer, a talk show host (Chelsea Lately), a sitcom actress (Are You There, Chelsea?) and a stand-up comedian with numerous specials to her credit. Shes authored a half dozen books, most on the New York Times best-seller list.

Im really into language and reading, says Handler, who is currently perusing author Jory Flemings How to Be Human: An Autistic Mans Guide to Life and Bestiary by K-Ming Chang.(Shes also is writing the forward for Shelly Tygielskis Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World.)

I probably read more than people would think, Handler says. Im fascinated by words and language. Thats why I like to communicate in so many different mediums. I like to talk. I like to write. I like to perform. It all works for me and I feel like when you recognize what you are good at doing, then you have to focus on doing that in an honest, authentic way.

Earlier this year, Handler launched the advice podcast Dear Chelsea with co-host Brandon Marlo, who is also Handlers calm and collected personal assistant. Together, they offer advice to callers who submit online questions. She said one of the more interesting calls they got was from a transgender man who struggled with smoking marijuana on a daily basis.

I said, Ill take a 30-day break from weed with you in solidarity, Handler says. He did it and came out to his family. His whole life opened up. Once he stopped, he had clarity and that kind of conversation is very moving and inspiring.

One of the themes in Handlers comedic work is her decision to see a therapist, and she poignantly details her experience in her new book and in some of her comedy routines.

Handler, one of six siblings, was born to a Mormon mother and Jewish father. When she was 9 years old, her 22-year-old brother, Chet, died in a hiking accident a tragic loss that impacted her family life. Handlers mother died 22 years later, from complications due to cancer.

In her book, Life Will Be the Death of Me, Handler details, with the help of her therapist, the steps she took to understand that her fear of loss and unresolved grief kept her from experiencing intimacy.

Though she remains single and still dating, Handler, now 46, states that she is fiercely independent and that she likes that status.

Listen, she says. I have never been more confident in my decision-making skills of remaining childless and alone. Im very grateful for my strategic choices, made on the off chance that I would be living through a global pandemic. Im not stuck at home, either home-schooling kids or plotting the murder of my husband. Talk about seeing the future and knowing what would work for me. I dont want to toot my own horn, but beep, beep.

When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Humphreys Concerts By the Bay, 2241 Shelter Island Drive, Shelter Island

Tickets: Sold out

Online: humphreysconcerts.com

Manna is a freelance writer.

See original here:

Comedian Chelsea Handler delivers comedy with a dose of therapy - The San Diego Union-Tribune

Such a deliberate use of words can diffuse a tense situation and lead to more self-awareness, understanding, and positive change.

Unfortunately, as we mature and understand words better, the use of words can lead to more conflict if the words themselves are transformed into weapons. How many times have you heard someone say that it is not what you said but how you said it? The delivery and interpretation of words can change their meanings dramatically.

Words matter, but the meanings of those words matter even more.

Mastering the many meanings of words is critical to understanding others, especially in the world of politics. It is within political discourse where we find the most significant use of wordsmithing. Here is where people are constantly jockeying for ideological position in their attempts to find a clear path to victory.

In the generation before this one, the phrase political correctness was originally meant to signify that someone was sensitive to language and actions that were racist, sexist, or homophobic. If you were being politically correct, you were trying to use labels that made people feel better about themselves, reduce discrimination, and promote equity. The change from firemen, policemen, and mailmen to firefighters, police officers, and mail carriers, for example, was considered a politically correct adaptation to the fact that many more personnel in fire, police, and postal departments were women.

While seemingly harmless and even positive, the meaning of the phrase political correctness was soon changed to a pejorative term by people who opposed this process of sensitivity. They relabeled the concept as "PC." This new meaning claimed that a PC person was someone who wasted their time trying not to offend anyone by watching every word they said. It is claimed that PC people are part of the cancel culture because they want to change the longstanding behavior of others through the excessive, constant, and annoying manipulation of our language.

This partisan evolution of the phrase political correctness demonstrates how the meaning of words can be changed to, in effect, weaponize them as tools against those who originated them.

Today, this same weaponization process has been applied to the concept of woke.

Originally, woke was a concept that came out of African American communities in the United States during the 1930s. It was a term used to help people become more aware of racial prejudice and discrimination that affected African Americans. Folks were encouraged to stay woke, or aware, of such disparities and to fight to change them.

In the last few years, though, woke has been used by many political groups fighting for equality. This broadening of the term has been quite expansive. Calls to stay woke can now be found at protests involving LGBTQ+ issues, womens rights, immigrant rights, environmental protection, economic inequality, funding for the arts, and many other social-justice issues.

The basic meaning of woke has become more of a general awareness of all forms of prejudice and discrimination and the need to defeat them.

The opponents of woke took this expanded meaning and twisted it to apply to anyone who they feel hates America and has declared war on our culture. They claim that woke activists push their identity politics so forcefully that they are destroying the unity of our nation. They demonize well-intending woke by saying they have no respect for tradition and that they wish to wipe out our collective history.

As adults, we have learned to use our words. Unfortunately, we have also learned to misuse other peoples words. When we weaponize words that were intended to do good, we undermine the goodness of those respective movements.

It is time to grow up as a society. We need to stop attacking those promoting social justice because we have become frustrated and fearful of change. We need to diffuse the current tense situation in our society by taking our clever word-power abilities and using them to promote more self-awareness, understanding, and positive change.

Dave Berger of Plymouth, Minnesota, is a retired sociology professor who taught for nearly three decades at Inver Hills Community College. He also is a regular contributor to the News Tribune Opinion page.

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Local View: Stop weaponizing 'woke,' other words of adversaries - Duluth News Tribune

By Donald B. Smith

Like most Americans I have been watching the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan with horror and dismay. Last Thursdays suicide bombings outside Kabul airport, which killed 13 U.S. servicemembers as well as killing and wounding scores of Afghan civilians, was a tragic and meaningless act of violence. It may also be a harbinger of future such attacks.

After 20 years of success in keeping terrorists at bay and thwartingattacks against our American homeland, we now leave Kabul in control of the very people who gave Osama bin Laden safe haven. This debacle will make America less safe for a generation or more, just as defeat in Vietnam did.

The American people only support putting our sons and daughters into harms way if U.S. national security is truly threatened. This was certainly the case in the wake of the horrific September 11, 2001, attacks.

However, many Americans grew weary of 20 years of commitment in Afghanistan and believed it was time to bring all the troops home. This was understandable, but the alternative should not be allowing Afghanistan to again become a breeding, training and staging ground for international terrorist groups who hate the United States, our values and way of life.

Unfortunately, our political leadership placed politics over our national security and the safety of the American people. Not only was the decision completely to withdraw from Afghanistan flawed, but the way this withdrawal or more properly retreat has been executed has become an international embarrassment.

We made mistakes that were unworthy of a global superpower. For example, announcing the withdrawal with a date certain that was not condition-based. Or not coordinating the pullout with our coalition partners. Or giving up our major military airbase at Bagram early in the withdrawal instead of as the final move, thus denying our forces and those of our Afghan allies the air support necessary to stave off the Taliban advance.

Furthermore, we abandoned Bagram Air Base in the dead of nighton July 6 without any prior coordination with our NATO allies or the Afghan commander, thereby undermining the confidence of the Afghan forces in American support.

The message from the White House to the free Afghans was clear and deadly: you are on your own. The government in Kabul was told plainly not to expect any of the air, materiel or intelligence support their forces had always depended on from the U.S. and NATO. Facing the brutal reality of being abandoned by their patrons, is it any wonder the Afghan troops collapsed in front of the determined and well-supported Taliban? We now face a humiliatingdefeat that has diminished U.S. credibility and threatened global stability.

It did not have to be this way. Even sustaining a minimal commitment would have bolstered Afghan morale, kept the Taliban guessing and ensured stability in Afghanistan as it has for two decades.

The irony is that even before the White House set the withdrawal deadline the United States had mostly already pulled back from Afghanistan. Since 2018 our missionunder the leadership of General Scott Miller transitioned to an air support, training, logisticsand leadership role with limited U.S. troops. We reduced American forces in Afghanistanto 2,500 troops, and many military leaders believed this would have been enough to maintain the status quo. There were also more than 10,000 NATO and allied troops from 38 nations supporting the effort. Despite disparaging comments from President Biden, the Afghan military was doing the bulk of the frontline fighting and taking almost all of the casualties.

The 2,500 support troops in Afghanistan allowed us to maintain our intelligence capabilities, have an embassy on the ground and secured access to Bagram Air Base. This modest deployment of troops had a more direct impact on our national security and the safety of the American people than the current 39,000 troops in Japan, 35,000 troops in Germany, 24,000 troops in South Korea, 6,300 troops in Kuwait and 5,500 troops in Bahrain, just to name some.And before the Kabul airport bombings the United States had not had a combat death in Afghanistan since February 2020.

But now we are faced with a meltdown reminiscent of the endgame in Saigon 46 years ago. Make no mistake, this is not a military defeat but a political calamity, just like in Vietnam. And now Afghan War veterans will experience the same deep frustration we Vietnam vets felt, that after decisively defeating an enemy on the battlefield, politicians have squandered our victory.

The more than 2,400 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan deserve better. As a nation, we must finally learn this hard lesson and never again let politics drive our national and homeland security strategy.

As we watch a third rate, ragtag military force dictate the terms of our withdrawal and force a weak president to adhere to their chosen timeline, we must pledge that we will return to a policy of Peace Through Strength including all the elements of national power, whether economic,diplomatic, military or intelligence. And we must also restore the power of moral leadership not hampered by progressive notions of political correctness unconnected to national security.

We cannot afford to allow defeat in Afghanistan to return our country to the hollow forces of the 1970s. This tragedy should inspire a new commitment to build the best equipped, best trained, and very importantly, the best-led military in the world. And never to let politicians throw away another military victory again.

Retired Brigadier General Donald B. Smith is a veteran of the Vietnam War and is former sheriff of Putnam County.

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Learning the Hard Lessons of Vietnam Once Again in Afghanistan - The Examiner News