In the early years of my conversion to Judaism (1994-1995), when I was filled with enthusiasm and ready to tell off other Jews for doing Judaism wrong, Dennis Prager would sometimes say to me, “Is it your place to do this?”
I never liked this perspective because I didn’t want to stay in my lane. Looking back, I realize he was right.
If you argue with terrorists such as Black Lives Matter activists, you are not to blame if they shoot you, but you are responsibility for needlessly placing yourself in danger. If you walk alone in a bad part of town and you get robbed or raped, I don’t blame you, but I do think you are responsibile for putting yourself needlessly in danger. Is this a meaningful difference? I hate getting accused of victim blaming when I point out that most people most of the time share responsibility for the bad things that happen to them.
From comments at Steve Sailer:
* I would watch the Christopher Guest mockumentary about a motley crew of neurotic social workers, psychologists, and assorted liberal arts grads attempting to deescalate crises as the newest unit of a defunded police department.
How many minutes into the movie before the retired sociology professor played by Eugene Levy gets paralyzed from the neck down by a jittery crackhead?
* I used to know a lot of police officers, and they all universally told me, When responding to a domestic dispute call, the very first thing you do is, go into the kitchen and turn off the stove, make sure there are no pots of boiling water. Most domestic disputes involve a man physically abusing his woman, but once the po-po arrive, the woman will suddenly side with her man against the cops, and that’s when the fun begins.
I look forward to troupes of Bennington and Oberlin grads getting scalded, in their new role as unarmed social-work Peace officers. I can already hear “Imagine” being sung en masse in the emergency rooms. Hell, maybe I’ll go back to working an ER, just for the lulz.
* But they should be large and muscular social workers so they can wrestle problem people down without shooting them. They could wear uniforms to make them identifiable, perhaps blue.
* Anyone who has worked at an inpatient psych ward will testify as to the general emotional unpredictabality and inordinate strength often possessed by residents. Decades of consistently positive interpersonal relations are no guarantee of future safety. Minimal physical conditioning is illusory once biochemistry flows, and lethargy flips to berserker mania in microseconds. Experience informs being calm, quiet, and kind but always defensively aware. Most conflict can be prevented with mindful situational awareness and control, but it is always surprising how strong, fast, and brutal individuals can be. Unfortunately, only experience can teach this wisdom and many find they’re not actually cut out for the job upon their first difficult situation….
”Controlling for a person’s personality, we also saw that many of the places they spent time in affected how they thought and felt in the moment,” said Prof. Harari. “People feel more extroverted, more agreeable, more conscientious, when they are in other places, compared to when they are at home,” she said, while “people feel more disorganized and chaotic when they are at home.”
That’s a finding business leaders might ponder as they consider whether to make remote working the norm after the pandemic subsides. When people spent time in social environments, they also felt more compassionate, open-minded and kind compared to when they were at home.
I suspect Blake Neff worked from home.
I suspect an increasing number of employers will require their employees to notify them about their social media presence, including accounts under pseudonyms.
* Gun violence is like the weather or tides – sometimes you get a storm surge. Those guns just get excited and start shooting at people – what can you do? It’s a double burden – first social unrest due to the death of George Floyd and now this upsurge in violence. Black communities are so unlucky in that they have suffered TWO completely unrelated tragedies in one year. Now let us turn our attention to more pressing issues, such as need to defund the police and not arrest Black people.
* Even worse that that, any attempt to posit a principled general rule, e.g. ” Actors must only play characters of their own race” immediately breaks down. Casting a black guy as Henry VI is not only permitted, it is praiseworthy.
The real New Rule is “WHITE actors must only play characters of their own race but non-whites can play whites.” But you can’t quite come out and say that (just yet) so you need to blow a bunch of rhetorical smoke to obscure what the actual New Rule is and make it sound less explicitly anti-white. For example, you can say “An actor can only play roles in a culture in which he was immersed.” According to this rule, whites can never play blacks but since blacks are immersed in white majority culture it’s okay for them to play whites. This is what she tries in the article, but frankly it is very weak sauce, just a tissue thin cover for reverse racism.
The New Rules really are just old Racist Rules turned on their head (in this and many other instances). In the racist past, whites could play Asians, Arabs, even blacks but Actors of Color could never be cast in white roles. Under the New Rules, whites can only play whites but Actors of Color can take any role . It’s really all who-whom. When whitey was in charge he made the up the rules to favor whites, now that PoC’s are in the ascendancy, the New Rules are going to favor them.
MLK’s vision of a color-blind society is dead, dead, dead. If society is color blind, then it’s impossible to make up rules that favor Black people, who deserve to be favored in order to make up for 400 years of not being favored. Maybe 400 years from now the score will be even but for the next 4 centuries at least, we need to load the dice in favor of Blacks by having special rules just for them and other Peoples of Color.
