“When Glenn Greenwald castigates the dead Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for racism,” the writer Sam Harris observed recently, “he’s not only proving that he’s a moral imbecile; he’s participating in a global war of ideas over free speech – and he’s on the wrong side of it.”
Back in April, the short story writer Deborah Eisenberg took a rather different view. In her letter to PEN’s executive director Suzanne Nossel, Eisenberg included Greenwald on a shortlist of people she considered worthier of PEN’s annual Freedom of Expression Award for Courage than the dead and surviving Charlie Hebdo staff. Unlike the slain cartoonists, she wrote of her recommendations, “their courage has been fastidiously exercised for the good of humanity.”
All things considered, this was an extravagant claim to make on behalf of Greenwald’s valour and integrity, particularly at Charlie Hebdo’s expense. Greenwald – formerly of Salon and the Guardian and now co-founding editor at Pierre Omidyar’s campaigning blog, the Intercept – is most famous as the journalist to whom rogue NSA employee Edward Snowden leaked a vast cache of national security information before finding sanctuary in Putin’s Russia. Eisenberg stated that it was for his work on this story that she was recommending him as an honouree.
But Greenwald’s reputation as an unbending defender of free expression stretches back a good deal further than this. Before becoming a writer, he had worked as a litigator defending clients in a number of controversial First Amendment suits, and has since written several trenchant polemics defending the right to unconditional free speech. In January 2013, for example, Greenwald wrote the following for the Guardian as part of a response to a French government proposal to censor online hate speech:
The history of human knowledge is nothing more than the realization that yesterday’s pieties are actually shameful errors. It is constantly the case that human beings of the prior generation enshrined a belief as objectively, unchallengably [sic] true which the current generation came to see as wildly irrational or worse. All of the most cherished human dogmas – deemed so true and undeniable that dissent should be barred by the force of law – have been subsequently debunked, or at least discredited. How do you get yourself to believe that you’re exempt from this evolutionary process, that you reside so far above it that your ideas are entitled to be shielded from contradiction upon pain of imprisonment? The amount of self-regard required for that is staggering to me.
Reading this, it would seem logical to suppose that Greenwald’s solidarity with the staff of Charlie Hebdo could be taken for granted. The magazine has, after all, dedicated itself to mocking religious and political pieties, and its attackers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, were surely guilty of the self-regard for which Greenwald expresses such vehement contempt. They considered themselves to be emissaries of God, no less (or – more directly – His fanatical, self-appointed earthbound representatives in Yemen), and sought to shield their beliefs from precisely the kind of criticism and ridicule which eventually cause such cherished dogmas to collapse.
Instead, as Sam Harris noted, the blood had scarcely dried on the walls of Charlie Hebdo‘s offices before Greenwald published a furious article at the Intercept, reviling the magazine for its alleged racism and pouring scorn on its defenders. That his misreading of Charlie Hebdo demonstrated a profound ignorance of their material and a dismal inability to parse satire ought to have been beside the point. After all, as Greenwald was at pains to remind his readers, he has spent much of his life defending the freedom of people to express views he abhors.
But while he was careful to include a perfunctory, throat-clearing defence of Charlie Hebdo’s narrow right to ridicule Islam, Greenwald’s more pressing concern was the denigration of people murdered for publishing cartoons offensive to their assassins. More telling still was the corresponding absence of any criticism of Al Qaeda’s pitiless death squad. Beliefs held to be unchallengeable by Islamic fundamentalists (but wildly irrational by the rest of us) were, it seems, to be exempted from the evolutionary process after all. This is all because Greenwald’s commitment to free speech is subject to a couple of slippery caveats, which make it rather more porous than he likes to pretend.
He had hinted at Caveat One with a couple of lawyerly qualifications buried in the paean to counter-orthodoxy quoted above. Dissent, he had argued, should not be barred “by the force of law” nor ideas shielded “on pain of imprisonment.” In other words, as far as Greenwald is concerned, the only meaningful kind of censorship – and the only kind worth opposing – is that mandated by the state, thereby excluding the kind imposed by terror and carried out by non-state actors like the Kouachis.
In 2013, Greenwald had argued that the whole idea of hate speech is simply a culturally- and historically-specific instrument for preserving the status quo. By 2015 – apparently unaware that he sounded exactly like those he had previously taken such pleasure in attacking – he was complaining that “some of Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons were not just offensive but bigoted.”
Had the French authorities shared this judgement, Greenwald would doubtless have ridden to the magazine’s defence. In 2008, he had written in defence of Ezra Levant, who was being investigated by the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission for republishing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad in the Canadian neoconservative periodical Western Standard. “Here,” Greenwald had announced, “are the noxious fruits of hate speech laws,” and he found them to be “nothing short of stomach-churning.”
But the French state – which makes a clear distinction between anti-clericalism and racial hatred – did not share Greenwald’s assessment of Charlie Hebdo; the magazine has never fallen foul of France’s hate speech laws, the very existence of which Greenwald denounces as unacceptably draconian.
As it happens, I agree with Greenwald that state-sponsored hate speech laws are deplorable and reactionary, no matter how well-intended. But at least Levant is still alive to speak in his own defence. And in democracies like France and Canada, court verdicts can be appealed and overturned; bad laws can be repealed; and journalists like Greenwald can inveigh against those responsible for both from their pulpits at Salon and the Guardian.
Why then does Greenwald’s stomach also not churn for the victims of state censorship in, say, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, or the Palestinian territories? Journalists in such states enjoy none of the rights and protections afforded by liberal democracies, and yet, on the subject of state repression in unfree societies, Greenwald is conspicuously silent.
This brings us to Caveat Two, which is that Greenwald’s governing principle is not the absolute defence of free expression, but an absolute opposition to democratic governments, which he presumes to be motivated by authoritarianism, mendacity, and self-serving hypocrisy in every instance. For Greenwald, Western power and Zionism are the only enemies worthy of his critical attention; forces of unparalleled cynicism and cruelty against which all resistance, no matter how vicious and sadistic, must be indulgently understood.
So, when Ezra Levant is investigated for re-publishing anti-Islamic cartoons, it is evidence of the stomach-churning intolerance of the Canadian state; when Charlie Hebdo is not, it is evidence of the thoroughgoing racism of France:
[Charlie Hebdo‘s] messaging – this special affection for offensive anti-Islam speech – just so happens to coincide with, to feed, the militaristic foreign policy agenda of their governments and culture.
I have never found any reason to suspect that Greenwald is remotely interested in understanding the complex considerations that inform Western foreign policy decisions. Nor have I found any reason to suspect that he is interested in investigating or understanding Islamist ideology. He finds it more convenient to prejudge the former as invariably malevolent, and the latter as invariably reactive.
Such reductionism has the benefit of being instantly applicable in any given scenario, thereby removing the need for reflection, informed analysis, and independent thought. But it also comes burdened with considerable dangers, not least among which is the corollary belief that anyone attacking the West by word or deed is doing so with good reason. And this assumption has frequently left Greenwald well-disposed towards the arguments of authoritarian governments (so long as they are enemies of the West) and non-state actors hostile to the whole notion of liberal democracy.
Posted inCensorship, Islam|Comments Off on Glenn Greenwald, Islam & Free Speech
In late October of 2014, Iraqi News reported, as ISIS forces rampaged through Diyala province, one of their soldiers found a thirty-year-old woman resting at her home and attempted to rape her. She fought back, wresting away his gun and killing him. This incredibly brave woman was brought before ISIS’s Sharia Court, which promptly condemned her to death and had her publicly beheaded for this defense of her honor, thus laying bare the utter hypocrisy of all claims that draconian laws regarding sex are intended for the protection of women.
The gory spectacle of radical Islamism at work that began in the Middle East and has spread its crimson tendrils abroad from there is terrifying to behold. To the eyes of those lucky enough to enjoy a secure place in one of the prosperous modern democracies, the violence unfolding on our television and computer screens has an almost hallucinatory quality. Surely, our brains say, this cannot be real. This sort of thing cannot be happening in this day and age!
Recently have I felt as if I can begin to taste the desperate fear of the Byzantines as Attila the Hun pressed against the walls of Constantinople. Who are these barbarians? What will they do next? How, how can they be so evil as they nakedly are?
While the sporadic attacks on Western soil are frightening, they are not what induce this existential terror in me. Rather it is the merciless force that ISIS, Boko Haram, and their imitators unleash on the very populations from which they arose. They systematically behead long lines of “unbelievers;” they mow down prisoners of war; they toss gay men from high buildings; they rape and enslave every girl and woman unfortunate enough to fall into their hands; and they obliterate their own history by dynamiting and destroying archeological sites. And while all the offenses in this list make me weep and gnash my teeth in helpless rage, it was the sight of the last one that finally sent a deep chill all the way into my bones.
For when I saw the pillagers attacking the giant winged bulls of Nineveh, when I saw them tear down the ancient gates and walls of the city those figures guarded, it made their real mission visible. These men are not trying to build up a glorious empire; they are not concerned with bringing the world’s souls to Allah; no, they are in a mad fury against civilization itself. In an ecstasy of rage fueled by their thwarted desires, they would burn the world.
Make no mistake: it is indeed desire that lies at the heart of this storm. It’s astonishing the degree to which both ISIS and Boko Haram are openly obsessed with sex, and yet how little this is commented on in the media. Both groups routinely abduct, rape, and forcibly “wed” girls. ISIS issued a pamphlet delineating the proper way to handle one’s personal sex slaves, and has strict rules even for women that are voluntarily part of the movement; each is awarded to a man, and if widowed they are quickly married off to another fighter. Boko Haram gained notoriety for its mass abduction of schoolgirls, yet it was barely implied in articles about the incident, not openly stated as the foregone conclusion it surely was, that those girls were certain to be brutally and repeatedly raped by many fighters for as long as they managed to survive the abuse.
This misguided reticence is a product of archaic cultural mores that make sex a thing of shame for women, but one of pride for men. No one wants to call these groups what they actually are, roving bands of armed rapists, because that would inevitably damage the standing of the women who fall prey to them. But unless we accept that this is a large part, perhaps the largest part, of their motivation (remember even suicide bombers are dying for the promise of eternal, unlimited sex) we will never understand them and thus, never learn how to defeat them.
This is not to say that the leaders and followers of these movements don’t desire power; they do. But in their hierarchical worldview, power is about status. That’s why massive destruction is an actual policy: since status is relative, degrading you exalts me. Like Lucifer, they would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. The caliph of ruins is still a caliph.
And that prize of status is so appealing because in primate troops, status determines access to females. What these groups are doing is no different from the Gombe Chimpanzee War, where four years of sporadic but horrific violence resulted in a total gain for the victors of three captured adult females and a small strip of territory that was quickly lost to another, bigger troop. Consider the fact that of 234 women and girls recently liberated from Boko Haram, no less than 214 were pregnant. The bloodshed in Iraq and Syria and Libya and Nigeria and everywhere else this contagion has spread is a savage primal conflict, where the whole point of conquering your neighbors is to steal their women.
In fact that primal character is what makes it contagious. And that’s exactly what frightens me. The glittering edifice that is contemporary civilization is built on the ground of evolved human nature, which is riddled with ancient faults, and sometimes, one of them moves. Moves, perhaps, with enough power to rip the modern world apart.
The last such earthquake to strike us was World War II. Nazism was a perverted apotheosis of kin selection; that is why it appealed. At the cost of millions of lives, humanity rendered a final decision: tribalism must go. This time, the slipping fault is the conflict between the evolutionary interests of men and women, and this explosion of violence will ultimately answer the question of whether male supremacy will continue to be tolerated, or be cast out at last. How many women will be slaughtered or reduced to breeding stock before enough men find the inner grit to make that choice rightly?
Posted inRape|Comments Off on Original Sin: the sexual motivation of religious extremists
In one recent study, we recruited over 1,100 varsity intercollegiate distance runners to complete surveys addressing their training, motivation and performance.
Compared to men, women reported being less competitive, training less and wanting to train less. The women reported greater commitment to their studies. Perhaps the most interesting finding was that these sex differences were just as large among the fastest as among the slowest runners. That is, even the very best female athletes, the ones with full scholarships and realistic professional prospects, were still quite different than their male counterparts.
In another recent study, we assessed the pacing of 92,000 runners at 14 different marathons. Although men and women both tended to slow their pace in the second half of marathons, this effect was stronger for men.
The sex difference was especially pronounced when looking at runners who slowed by 30% or more – men were three times as likely as women to do this. These results indicate that more male marathoners undertake a competitive, risky pace. They begin at a pace that could lead to a superb performance, given their own talent and training, but one that also increases their chances of crashing or “hitting the wall.”
Another study of ours focused on participation at track races and road races by masters runners, who are at least 40 years old.
At road races, women comprised 52% of participants, but at track meets they comprised about 25% of participants. This pattern is remarkable because road races and track meets draw different kinds of runners. At road races, most runners have a recreational orientation, not a competitive one. This is revealed in how road racers answer questionnaires and in their generally slow performances.
Track meets are different because, although they are not as popular, the runners who do show up almost always run fast relative to sex-specific, age-specific world records.
The sex difference in participation at track meets indicates that the relatively small number of older competitive runners are still much more likely to be men than women. In this study, we also checked if the sex difference in track meet participation had decreased over the past 25 years, as it had for road race participation. We found that women narrowed the gap slightly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the sex difference has been stable since then.
We have also found substantial sex differences in performance depth. For example, in a typical 5-kilometer road race, for every woman that finishes within 125% of the female world record, there are roughly three men who finish within 125% of the male world record.
We have documented this pattern in hundreds of road races and also in large samples of high school, collegiate and professional runners. The best supported explanation for this sex difference is that more men are motivated to do the training necessary for fast performances. We have examined whether this sex difference is shrinking and, again, we found that it isn’t.
Posted inFeminism|Comments Off on What do new studies tell us about the sex difference in distance running?
Essay: In the 1975 bestselling book: Against Our Will, the feminist writer, Susan Brownmiller, asserted that “rape is about power, not sex.” Ever since, the conventional wisdom has been that rapists are misogynistic men seeking domination and power over women, not violent men seeking sex.
However, there is a fundamental problem with Brownmiller’s bold assertion. In the ensuing 45 years, there has been no significant empirical research to support her claim. Yet, almost everyone repeats it.
In examining eight years of FBI data on 250,000 rapes and other sexual assaults, one factor stands head-and-shoulders above the others: the age range of the victims. Herein lies the key to unlocking the mystery of the offender’s motivation.
Social science has demonstrated a strong relationship between age and sexual attractiveness. Heterosexual men are sexually attracted to young women, while homosexual men are attracted to young men. The age preference explains why adult film stars, sex workers, exotic dancers as well as glamour models are often young, and why their earnings decline as they age.
Studying the ages of victims, therefore, provides an opportunity to examine sexual motivation. If rapists are primarily motivated by the desire for power and domination, then one would expect them to prefer middle-aged, career women. However, if rapists primarily desire sex, then one would expect them to prefer young women and men. Our research demonstrates that offenders almost always attack the young (see the figure below). The percentage of female victims who are over 50 is close to zero. Similarly, in male prisons, where women are extremely scarce, heterosexual men target the youngest inmates.
Most recent discussions about sexual assault have focused on college students. However, it is high school kids that are at the greatest risk of being sexually assaulted. Our analyses of FBI data reveal that 15-year-olds are at the highest risk of sexual assault. They are about 9 times more likely to be raped than 35-year-olds. Women rarely engage in sexual assault – they make up 3% of the offenders – but when they do commit sexual assaults, they most often target 15-year-olds. A power motive can’t explain why both male and female offenders prefer young victims. Only a sexual motive can do the job.
Sexual assault is as much a crime against young people as it is a crime against women. A 15-year-old male is more likely to be a victim of a sexual assault than a 40-year-old female. 15-year-olds may be at greater risk because their social life brings them into contact with potential rapists. But difference in opportunity is only a partial explanation. An analysis of whether female robbery victims are sexually assaulted during the incident suggests that the sexual attractiveness of young people is an important factor. Since the robber has already established dominance over a vulnerable victim, the effects of opportunity and vulnerability are removed, and only the effect of the offender’s age preference remains. In such cases, robbers are much more likely to rape victims between the ages of 15 and 29—the years when women (and men) tend to be the most sexually attractive. Only a sexual motive can account for this pattern.
Sexual offenders of all ages prefer young victims. Even elderly offenders target 15-year-olds the most. Also, men who commit sexual assault tend to be considerably older than men who commit other types of violent crimes. The relatively high rate of sexual offending by older men is likely due to the fact that they have become less attractive with age while their sexual attraction to young people is undiminished. The men and women they find most attractive are not attracted to them. Some of them use force to get their way.
Most date rapes occur during consensual sex when one partner, usually the man, wants to go further and the other does not. At the point of assault, men have an especially strong sexual drive. This is not to argue that men are overcome by desire. They can still control themselves, so sexual motivation is no excuse. However, arousal from any source increases impulsive behavior so it probably plays a role in date rape. The same goes for drugs and alcohol.
The reason most rapists target females is that a larger percentage of males are heterosexuals, not that they hate females. Homosexual men actually have as high an offense rate as heterosexual men. Gay men are just as likely to attack males as straight men are to attack females.
Any explanation of sexual assault must account for why gay men commit the crime at least as often as straight men. It must explain why offenders, regardless of age and gender, overwhelmingly target young people. Most importantly, it must be based on solid social scientific evidence, not feminist orthodoxy. The evidence is substantial and it leads to a simple conclusion: most rapists force victims to have sex because they want sex.
Richard Felson is professor of sociology and criminology at Penn State University.
Richard Moran is professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley MA.
Posted inRape|Comments Off on To Rape is to Want Sex, Not Power
JERUSALEM – How have Tel Aviv’s young liberals responded to a decision by Israel’s conservative, right-wing education minister to ban a novel about forbidden love between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim?
They’ve made a video of Israelis and Palestinian kissing each other.
Published online Thursday morning by the magazine Time Out Tel Aviv, the video shows six young couples – male, female, straight and gay – kissing for the first time. Some of the pairs were already friends, and others had never met before. (It’s a take on the Tatia Pilieva 2014 project First Kiss)
Ironically, its almost impossible to tell who is Israeli and who is Palestinian in the video.
The provocative clip comes a week after it was revealed that Israel’s Education Ministry had disqualified Dorit Rabinyan’s book “Borderline” from a list of recommended reading for an advanced high school literature course. Yet to be released in English, “Borderline” is the story of an Israeli Jewish woman and a Palestinian Muslim man who meet in New York, fall in love and then part ways. She returns to Tel Aviv and he to Ramallah.
The Education Ministry said it banned the book from its literature list to maintain the “identity and heritage of students in every sector.” Ministry officials were worried that the “intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threatens the separate identity,” reported Israeli daily Haaretz, which broke the story.
Some of Israel’s more liberal lawmakers criticized the move, calling it racist and a gross attempt at censorship.
Posted inArabs, Israel|Comments Off on WP: The response to an Israeli official’s ban on a Jewish-Arab love story? A video of Jews and Arabs kissing
To avoid AIDS, don’t have unprotected bum sex with blokes and don’t share needles.
From the Los Angeles Times: “Besides, Burkle said, Clinton had other things he was focused on, namely setting up his foundation and its work on AIDS prevention in Africa and other global issues.”
Posted inAfrica, AIDS|Comments Off on What Kind Of Dolt Works In AIDS Prevention?
* I went to the physical therapist today for my tight hamstrings.
PT: “So what do you do?”
Luke: “I teach freedom of movement.”
* If you want to get ahead in Hollywood, take Crescent Heights. I did five miles around 8am in 15 minutes.
* Luke: “Is she the fat one?”
Friend: “You have a way with words.”
* Given the large number of stupid accidents stupid people get into, it seems stupid to employ stupid people.
* I’m not worried about North Korea. They only do what China tells them to do, and no more.
* Oriental: “I was in NZ recently eating a meat pie at a table. a white NZer came up to me and dropped some chopsticks in front of me and said, do you need these? also, i was walking along a street in Auckland and some maori youths racially abused me for being asian. I’m not going back to NZ.”
“I’m very disturbed by what’s happening in Cologne and equally disturbed that outrage seems to be channeled into whether the Star Wars monopoly has a female token.”
“As for Asians in Australia, I think it is mainly still whites in managerial positions. The biggest race tension in Australia right now is Chinese buying too much baby formula.”
Posted inPersonal|Comments Off on Freedom Of Movement
* I had a while back a conversation with a Swedish girl doing volunteer work in Africa. She had come to visit friends in a dangerous African city and traveled alone. Even on the Swedish scale she was above average in leftist internationalism. We talked about immigrants from far away places living in Sweden and at one point she remarked in an elated way that down the line there would be a day when people are mixed all around so no more blondes would exist and the world would all look the same. What was striking was her demeanor that seemed to relish this glorious vision of the future. She was blonde and had blue eyes and attractive so not one of those I want to wreck the world types because I’m not pretty and don’t get laid.
This conversation seems to me an express manifestation of probably what a lot of liberal Western Europeans want or are sympathetic to. Although others are not so blunt outside of Swedish leftism, the desire is to create a new stock of people in Europe through blending with other races. Such an idea is of course the product of a long reaction to WWII. If what brought so much destruction in the early 20th century in Europe centered on pride in Nordic supremacy, then a way to ensure that that tendency does not return is to make sure there are no longer any Nordic people.
Although when expressly stated it seems far-fetched, there’s a wide range of attitudes that are sympathetic to this end goal. So the sexual vibe you sense is real, there is a desire not for large scale race replacement but a desire to see other races amalgamated on a large scale into the European gene pool.
* This attitude must include an aspect of Nordic supremacy: we are, on the whole, more beautiful, competent, and creative than anybody else, so we must be miscegenated out of existence.
* This silly but demented girl-woman-child was travelling to Africa to get boinked by the natives. She can dress it up in any kind of crap she wants but she was already putting into practice her mixing philosophy. In civilized societies men get restrained by women but women need restraining and channeling too. As in Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Lets admit the Muslims have this part right though taken too far.
I like combat and I’ve watched a ton of the GoPro videos of the street fighting in Syria.
The fireworks streaking past the Cologne Cathedral look identical to tracer rounds. Did any of the Merkel Youth yell “Allah akbar” as they do in all the Syrian war videos?
Are the fireworks and rapes a foreshadowing to something worse? I can hear Enoch Powell: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding.”
* When people from that part of the world come to the West, they have contradictory passions.
1. Contempt. “These women are shameless whores in the obscene decadent west.”
2. Boing!!!!! “Finally, we can have massive orgies and screw anyone in sight cuz they’re just begging for it”… or at least that’s what they’ve seen from Western media that promote and hype the likes of Nikki Minaj, Kim Kartrashian, Miley Cyrus, and etc.
If space aliens were to learn about the West from the pop culture media, they would get the impression that Western women are all whores who are just dying for some action. From rappers, they’d think normal male behavior in the West is to act like thugs. They’d think the West is one big BEASTIE BOYS party. Of course, in people in the West take that stuff with a degree of irony and fun.
Can’t really blame Muslim men for thinking western women are a bunch of hookers. Just look at the pop culture.
Muslim men have been Joe-Buck-ized.
But people in other cultures(with far less sense of irony) see it as reality, even a ‘right to party’.
I knew an Assyrian family that left Kuwait after the Gulf War. Ironically, they sided with Hussein’s invasion and then found refuge in the US that destroyed Hussein. Wacky, I know.
But anyway, their three sons had such passion for American trash culture. But at the same time, their old world values felt nothing but contempt for western whores.
They are happy to be in the land of whores and treat women like whores, but they also feel nothing but derision for these women.
But to some degree, I think Bob Dylan felt it too. In some ways, he was very modern and cosmopolitan. But there was another side of him that was near-Biblical and family-oriented.
It’s partly there in PORTNOY”S COMPLAINT too. On the one hand, there is the ‘boing’ for the shiksa. But there is also the powerful pull of Jewish culture and the tribe. The Jewish guy hooks up with some shiksa bimbo and is happy to bang her… but also despises her as a slut dolt trash.
Sort of like what happens with the Sydney Pollack character in Husbands and Wives.
Initially, he likes the bimbo shiksa but comes to feel contempt for her as a bimbo who thinks King Lear is King Leo.
Comment: “A Gay Indian man is complaining that a lot of Gay White guys on dating sites are not open to dating men from his race. Wow Indian men really are seen as extremely undesirable in the American dating market. Not only are Heterosexual White women rejecting the sexual advances of Indian men, Gay White men are turning them down as well.”
Denis Fernando writes for GayStarNews.com: I go to Pride in 2015 and see black, Asian and Muslim LGBTIs applauded like never before. I go on Grindr and see profiles saying ‘no blacks’, ‘no Asians’.
Everyone knows being a gay Asian means facing homophobia and racism. Some people are surprised to hear this includes negative experiences as an Asian man within the LGBTI community, which is supposed to be a liberal, welcoming environment.
The Islamophobic abuse of Muslim men on Grindr in the days after the Paris terror attacks again highlighted the prejudices within the gay community.
Anthony Magallanez was accused of being part of ISIS by another Grindr user. The irony of course being that ISIS is barbarically homophobic and Muslims are by far the most numerous of its victims.
I regularly go on Pride marches. The warm welcome that Black and Muslim groups get at these events show boundaries are being broken down all the time. All is not rosy – it’s often a fight to get high profile visibility and these environments are not free of racism and prejudice either. But, from what I’ve seen, that is improving and people are listening.
So when I see phrases such as ‘no blacks’ ‘no Asians’ and ‘no Muslims’ on dating apps, it feels like something from the intolerant Britain of the 1960s when my parents faced ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ signs in landlord’s windows.
As a black man, when I see these words, I do not feel like I’m on a dating app in the 21st century and I’m surprised there are forums in which people think such language is socially acceptable. It certainly wouldn’t be in a bar, café or workplace.
Some people argue they are entitled to date and sleep with who they want and that in some instances, that preference can be for black or Asian men over white men. This is true although I personally don’t have any ethnic preference.
To gay men who don’t understand what the fuss is about, I would ask you to subject your profiles to the ‘1960s racist landlord’ test. If what you are writing sounds like one of those signs my parents faced, then you need to change your wording.
By the way, that racist landlord from the 1960s was also a homophobe, so you and your boyfriend were not getting a room there just like my parents.
There is a way of stating your preferences positively. ‘(Preferred ethnic preference) to the front of the queue,’ for example. Although if there was a queue to speak of, I doubt you would be on Grindr.
The truth is that dating apps are a tiny expression of a bigger issue.
The idea of that the LGBTI community, liberated and liberal on sexuality, would also be liberal, enlightened and liberated on the issue of racism was shattered quite early on in my foray into this community and politics.
And I can tell you that coming out was hard enough without having to also accommodate these problems.
This is not just my experience. I know Muslim women in hijab, some of whom are straight but huge advocates of our community, others who are lesbian Muslims looking for a night out at a gay venue, who get stopped in the queue and questioned.
The assumption by security guards is they are straight and they don’t belong. This could easily be the first experience of a young Muslim LGBTI person looking for a supportive environment to come out. They describe it as being the same as being stopped at immigration in an airport.
A study by FS Magazine in the UK shows African Caribbean and Asian men’s experiences range from flagrant racism, to being excluded in clubs to being considered fetishized sexual objects.
Posted inHomosexuality, Race|Comments Off on ‘No blacks, no Asians’ on Grindr shows how racist gay men actually are
John Reid writes: Donald Trump has shifted the Overton Window, soaring to the top of the polls while championing issues the political class believed were off-limits. But even Trump seemed to side with the Left in deploring Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent remarks about Affirmative Action’s paradoxical negative impact on African-Americans. Of course, Scalia had an entirely reasonable point. However, it’s time to face up to the real scandal: the damage that Affirmative Action does to displaced whites (and Asians).
During oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, UT attorney Greg Garre argued that when school dropped Affirmative Action policies, diversity plummeted. Scalia commented:
“I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer [black students without Affirmative Action]. Maybe it ought to have fewer…And I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”
“There are those who contend that it does not benefit African–Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a less —a slower—track school where they do well,”
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid [Email him] claimed that Scalia’s words do not belong in “the mouths of national figures” and show “just how out of touch he is with the values of this nation” [Reid: Scalia’s ‘racist’ comments worse than Trump, by Jordain Carney, The Hill, December 10, 2015]
That a sitting Supreme Court justice could feel emboldened enough to articulate the kind of boldfaced belief in white supremacy thought to have ended with formal racial segregation illustrates the contours of the nation’s New Jim Crow, a system that justifies the dearth of African-American bodies in predominantly white spaces by questioning whether they truly belong there in the first place. [Scalia Comments Shine Light on U.S. Institutional Racism, Newsweek, December 10, 2015]
The NAACP claimed that “We were alarmed and extraordinarily disappointed to hear a justice of the Supreme Court make comments that were laden with racial prejudice and that were based on an assumption of racial inferiority.” It demanded that Scalia recuse himself. [Justice Scalia under fire for race comments during Affirmative Action argument, by David G. Savage, Los Angeles Times, December 10, 2015]
Of course, those less-muted gaspers already favored Affirmative Action anyway. And Scalia had his defenders. But by shrieking and creating a scandal, the Left once again succeeded in shifting the Overton Window in its direction. What was once the most Politically Correct reason to oppose Affirmative Action—that it was damaging to blacks—is now Officially Offensive.
Note that Scalia was not suggesting that blacks are inherently unfit to succeed at top schools, merely that blacks who have inferior grades and test scores t o their white and Asian peers will not excel. This is known as the Mismatch Theory.
Admitting blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans to hypercompetitive colleges that otherwise would have rejected them, Mismatch Theory holds, just means that these students are more likely to burn out and fail. Even those who do manage to graduate often end up taking less challenging majors and ultimately learn less. Mismatch Theory suggests that these students would have been better off attending a less competitive school where they would have excelled.
The Mismatch Theory is popular amongst Conservatism Inc. intellectuals because it argues that we should oppose Affirmative Action because it hurts blacks—not because it hurts whites and Asians. This is not a new argument, but it’s more plausible than the “soft bigotry of low expectations” trope about black self-esteem, and much more acceptable in the current climate.
But, though plausible, the theory may be overstated. To take an extreme example: one Kashawn Campbell, an African American student who lacked basic writing skills, was admitted into the University of California-Berkeley, where he struggled. He was profiled by the Los Angeles Times.
At Cal, he was among the hardest workers in the dorm, but he could barely keep afloat. Seeking help, he went at least once a week to the office of his writing instructor, Verda Delp. The more she saw him, the more she worried. His writing often didn’t make sense. He struggled to comprehend the readings for her class and think critically about the text. “It took a while for him to understand there was a problem,” Delp said. “He could not believe that he needed more skills. He would revise his papers and each time he would turn his work back in having complicated it. The paper would be full of words he thought were academic, writing the way he thought a college student should write, using big words he didn’t have command of.”
Campbell was an extreme example of racial preferences. He attended Jefferson High School, which was 91% Hispanic, 8.4% African American, 0.0% Asian, and is 0.0% white. When Campbell graduated from the school in 2012, only 4.1% of the students were proficient in Math and only 18.9% were proficient in English (that was an improvement from a few years earlier when the numbers were 0.6 and 12.9). Campbell was likely admitted through California’s policy of admitting the top students at every high school. Even under normal racial quotas, Campbell probably would not have been admitted. But because California ostensibly did away with racial preferences after Proposition 209 and now just takes the top of the class at non-white schools, this created distortions from which he benefitted.
Reflecting upon the story, UCLA Law professor Eugene Volokh suggested “it seems likely that Campbell would have been more successful at a school such as Cal State, which is more likely to spend more time remedying the gaps in Campbell’s education” [The Mismatch Effect, in the L.A. Times, Volokh Conspiracy, August 23, 2013].
But is this true? During his first year, Campbell managed to squeak through by taking African American Studies classes. A year later he seemed happy at Berkeley, writing “I have learned more about what it means to be black in a new environment. It’s a beautiful struggle that warms me up like morning tea, knowing that I am making a statement with all of these activities and my ethnicity” [Beyond the banner: what inspired our poster students, The Daily Californian, November 3, 2014].
Between the tutors, teachers allowing Campbell (right) to retake classes, and African American studies courses, he will probably manage to graduate. He may lack basic writing skills, but Campbell no doubt has a profitable career ahead of him being black for a living.
Responding to the hoopla over Scalia’s comments, Stuart Taylor wrote,
[M]any recipients of large racial preferences would be better off in the long run—with more learning, better careers, and perhaps happier lives—if they went to less prestigious but still excellent schools where they could do well academically.
Prestige has obvious advantages. The question is whether they outweigh the costs of being near the bottom of the class.
I’m skeptical. I attended a semi-prestigious undergraduate school and an elite law school. When I applied for jobs after undergrad, not one employer asked for my transcript. They were confident that I was smart enough just based on the school’s pedigree. To most employers, being a poor student in undergrad at a top-notch institution is better than floating by at a mediocre one.
I did have to give my grades when I applied to Law School, but of course, these law schools also have racial preferences. It’s hard to argue that most Affirmative Action admissions harmed their recipients at elite law schools. Virtually no one fails out and at the top 3 law schools in the country—Harvard, Yale, and Stanford—do not have grades, nor does UC Berkley (ranked 8h). While all these schools have some distinctions among students, it is impossible to determine who is at the bottom of the class. Most other of the elite top 14 (T-14) law schools do not let students know their rank and some do not allow them to put their GPA on their resumes when applying for jobs. Similarly, elite MBA programs do not allow students to disclose their grades until after they are hired.
Based on their test scores, it seems like many, if not most, blacks who attend the top three Law Schools would have not been accepted to any of the “T-14” schools, but may have been accepted on the merits at schools at the bottom of the top 20. Most of the students accepted at the other schools would have ended up in schools ranked 20th-50th without Affirmative Action.
At most T-14 schools, if you have decent social skills and have OK grades you can get a job at a corporate law firm, while at the 20-50 ranked schools, you need to have top grades and law review. As blacks rarely make law review or honors at any school (at my law school, not one black received honors for being in the top quarter of the class), the firms choose based on where they attended.
And of course, Affirmative Action continues through graduation with law firms giving jobs to minority students with poorer grades than the white students at the same schools…
COMMENTS:
* SCALIA HAS A VERY GOOD POINT—BAN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.
Thanks for the great article, Sir. Well written and agree with almost everything you said. (Harry Reid, the election thief, is a disgrace and simply utters what he thinks his liberal masters want to hear).
The mismatch theory applies not just to admission, but even the pressure to graduate or get into college that is being pushed on blacks.
Maybe some blacks do not want to graduate. Maybe they are not that keen on going to college, let alone top colleges where they will do poorly. So why entice them with affirmative action towards a path they don’t wish to walk?
School standards have been watered down, and math and science classes diluted to allow blacks to graduate at the same rate as whites and the whole society pays the price.
Affirmative action is racist, not only because it discriminates against whites, but because it eventually hurts blacks by conning them into thinking they are capable in areas that they are not and leading them into fields they are not cut out for.
* The entire ‘scandal’ over Scalia’s sensible remarks is pure political cant. Unfortunately, reality-denial has now become a requirement for public service. Even our Courts are feeling the heat. ‘Equal treatment under law’ is constantly being tweaked and revised. This is a very unhealthy trend.
Significantly, ‘outraged’ liberal writers like Liptak, Rothwell and Savage (above) are probably very comfortable with the idea of diverging mental capacities among/between whites (and by implication, Jews). Of course they are.
After all, that’s why there’s Harvard, Princeton and Yale!
And that’s why Jews are found at elite universities in such great numbers. These are the children of Einstein!
Indeed, differences in human intelligence have always been taken for granted–even among siblings with the same two parents.
In fact, many ‘gifted’ students have siblings with average–and sometimes below-average–IQs. This should not be shocking. Like inborn athletic potential, intellectual capacities are bestowed by nature in unequal portions. True?
So why shouldn’t genetically-isolated populations (races) mirror this ‘diversity’?
Variations in human intelligence occur. Among families, tribes, ethnic communities, and races. Even breeds of dogs exhibit differences in innate mental capacity. This is biology talking. The rest is politicized nonsense.
But science has become a VERY BIG OBSTACLE for the ‘racial egalitarian enforcers’ who manage America’s political discourse. Genes and intelligence? Different ethnic backgrounds…. Race?
That’s white supremacism!
And so, the Social Justice Warriors must pretend (and declare) that the descendants of African slaves must have precisely the same proportion of intellectually-gifted children as Ashkanazi Jews, Boston Presbyterians, or Hong Kong Chinese. Call in the bean-counters!
The offspring of NBA players need equal representation at MIT.
But this ruse is even more absurd that it looks. Even the bean-counters have to pull their punches.
After all, we cannot (and must never) count (apply) ‘quotas’ to Jews. Heavens no!
Whites must bow (as well as Asians) but Jews are exempt from the machinations of affirmative action. Even the US government is prohibited from counting them.
On the other hand, sacrificing a little white ‘privilege’ is an appropriate and necessary step for achieving social justice.
But why should mandating an equal and proportional sacrifice from America’s most successful group be beyond the pale?
Why?
It’s anti-Semitic!
Just watch this movie or read that book if you don’t believe me.
So it’s whites (or Asians) who must pay for ‘unequal outcomes’ in education. No ‘social remedy’ or demographic slight-of-hand can be implemented if it victimizes you-know-who. That’s when ‘affirmative action’ slips down the ugly slope into ‘quotas’.
Therefore, Jews are exempt from numerically-derived (and politically-correct) policies of academic exclusion. This is a very kosher remedy for academic inequality.
When can we examine these policies and discuss their disparate impact?
When?
Not now. Maybe never.
* A well known economist/investment advisor mentioned in his Christmas newsletter that an associate of his, a wealthy hedge fund manager, had funded an academy in Somalia for boys and that we were encouraged to donate. He pointed out that this schools graduates had been ‘accepted” into elite schools in America and the UK. That they would be the leadership of tomorrow’s Somalia.
I about threw up upon reading this. While anyone is free to spend their own money as they see fit, the idea that it is, somehow, morally preferable to assist a poor African by sending him to school at an elite Western school and deny the American student a spot at his own universities is appalling. It is also naive to believe the Somalian, having had a taste of Yale or Cambridge, is going to be in any hurry to head back to Somalia and ‘build’ his own nation. Experience tells us he is more likely to overstay his visa and do whatever it takes to never return home.
* Black surgeon? Black lawyer? Black teacher? Heck, even a black mechanic, who on Earth wants to trust any of them are competent?
Affirmative Action is a stain on EVERY single black in the middle or higher class now.
By raising the actual cost of every black (brown, LGBT, etc.) employee (because each one carries a risk of lawsuit-publicity-settlement extortion), I can’t help wondering just how high is the dead-weight cost to businesses in America today.
* True story: about 15 years ago, while working as an intern in the Dept of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, I suffered a broken tooth, so I went to the nearest provider on my included healthcare plan to have it capped. Turned out to be a black woman.
What followed was the most horrifically painful experience of my life. A couple of hours of searing, excruciating pain, with the tears running down my face, while she kept insisting that all was well, it was nearly over, and there was no need for any more pain killers.
I assumed that she knew what she was doing – that this was just what you had to go through to get a broken tooth capped.
So when, ten years later, living in rural Missouri, I again broke a tooth, I put off fixing it for weeks, in fear of what it would be like.
Finally bowed to the inevitable and went to the local dentist – a middle-aged white guy who couldn’t seem to stop telling you about the latest news he’d gleaned from Rush Limbaugh.
Result? Totally painless procedure, out in half an hour.
To this day, I wonder about what that lady in Bethesda put me through: was it mere incompetence? Or active malice?
Regardless, the moral of the story is: never, ever, put yourself in the hands of a black professional, no matter how “qualified,” if you’ve got the option of some nobody white grunt instead.
* Granted that Japs are the most innovative East Asians, but Canada and Australia are not getting Japs right? They are getting Chinese. The vast majority of Japs seem happy to stay in Japan. About the Indian Brahmins, they ran India into the ground after the British left, what makes you people think that they will run the Canadian or Australian government any better once they are in charge whatever their IQ is, and what makes you people think that Indian Brahmins will be any more benevolent towards the black and Latino underclass, or towards the Abos and Canadian First Nations, or poor whites, than they are to the untouchable and lower castes underclasses in India?
* When AA hires prove that they can’t be productive in the stock in trade of the business or professional association that hired them, they can get shoehorned into “minority recruiting,” “event planning,” “VP of diversity,” “community liaison,” “head of pro bono practice group,” etc.
AA isn’t just necessarily bad for students – those who benefit and those who are displaced alike – but is corrupting to the institution itself. There was a scandal involving a Philadelphia area lawschool wherein the admissions office was reporting false (augmented) LSAT and GPA data for incoming students to the accrediting authority. One of those insiders scandalized and dismissed was the Dean assigned the responsibility for diversity and inclusiveness. Higher hard scores would boost U.S. News rankings. It’s fairly apparent that they were pursuing diversity at the expense of the quality of the incoming classes and simply lied to prevent the inevitable result from negatively affecting the ranking.
In my own Law School experience black students were offered special treatment by, inter alia but especially the black professors. What was rumored was anything from special and inexhaustible office hours through special tutoring in which the exam material would be “tipped” (and, of course, if the relevant material is reinforced enough by the professor it could be possible to “game” the blind exam system with a repeated recitation of a pattern of words). N.B. Exams were usually three to four hours a piece but cover only a limited scope of material such that knowing what would be on the exam before preparing would be an extreme advantage to the student. The other gambit was the offering of silly advocacy classes (“Women and the Law”) which were easy As and Bs, while serious students would take courses like “Federal Taxation” or “Corporations.”
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Even a brave conservative like Heather Mac Donald has claimed that Mismatch Theory “is the most powerful critique of Affirmative Action yet developed” . 
Between the tutors, teachers allowing Campbell (right) to retake classes, and African American studies courses, he will probably manage to graduate. He