But don’t obsess over it
Michael Shermer’s been shedding his light on the world again.
Sure, by all means, talk about it, but don't obsess over it, don't assume everyone is a racist, & don't try to find racism in everything. https://t.co/g2QcyiQBkR
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) April 12, 2017
The “it” in “talk about it” is race and racism. Shermer with his 118 thousand followers says sure by all means talk about race and racism but do it within these limits prescribed by him.
That’s not a good look. It’s not a good look for a prosperous white guy to issue short sharp instructions on how much and in what manner people can talk about racism.
But it gets worse.
No! If you are against racism then stop classifying people by race. If you insist on racial classification don't be surprised when others do https://t.co/qSUIomLLW1
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) April 12, 2017
Right and if you’re against sexism just stop classifying people by sex oh wait
So naturally I did a couple of snotty retweets-with-comments, which automatically showed up on Facebook, which resulted in a tedious argument with someone of the “Shermer has a right to his opinion and you’re an SJW” school of thought. It felt like 2013.
What can I tell you? Shermer has those 118 thousand followers (see above). He’s a Name; he has influence. He’s also shallow, and pugnacious, and not as clever as he thinks he is. For all those reasons I think it’s ok for us underlings to annotate his tweets now and then. But the “You SJW” guy on Facebook thinks I’m wrong and harmful for doing so. “Great way to build a movement,” he told me. Say what? I’m not trying to build a movement. A movement of what? Libertarians? No thank you, we already have plenty of those.
Could someone remind me why this guy is considered to be smart? Thanx.
Easy for a Rich White Male to avoid ‘obsessing’ about race. He’s not getting shot at because of the colour of his skin.
Why doesn’t he (and FB guy) just let Market Forces sort it out? Why try to be all dic(k)tatorial over it?
Not to mention an alleged rapist. But that’s OK because women don’t matter. If they did matter, a thing like that might disqualify him from a place in polite discourse.
But you are a social justice warrior… does dude think that’s gonna somehow hurt your feelings?
Logically speaking, there is no way to call out racism without “classifying people by race.”
It’s on a par with “if you’re against crime, then stop arresting people and classifying them as criminals.” Well, yes, if we didn’t enforce the laws at all, then you could pretend that there’s no crime by pointing to the lack of arrests and convictions. But that wouldn’t mean that crimes weren’t being committed.
And I continue to love the irony every time a capital-S Skeptic lectures people about “obsessing” over minor topics. Dude, your entire movement is based on obsessing over what most people consider to be minor topics. It’s ok, we all have our pet “minor” topics, and it’s good that someone is countering pseudoscience, but have a little perspective!
Shermer is constantly shedding, it seems.
There are a whole lot of white men who want to feel smarter than other people. For many of them, being an atheist does that – really, I’m confident that they’re certainly reaching that point by taking an even-handedly skeptical approach to religion, because they’re not taking any such attitude to race, sex, or class issues. The set of white male atheists who don’t want to have to abandon any privileged views about race, sex, or class and do want to feel smarter than someone else will regard Shermer (and/or Sam Harris, and to some extent Richard Dawkins) as speaking their bro-language. Those 118,000 will pump a lot of reputation for Shermer out there. And to be sure, when his brain is engaged in critical thought, it works – it’s just that there are wide swaths of “common sense” where his prejudices are simply The Abundant Proclamations of the Natural Light and using his brain to do anything to back them up just isn’t happening.
And even if he is going to think, well, if someone is EVER going to let their brain go on vacation, when they use Twitter is a sadly plausible place for them to do it – especially when they are already convinced they don’t NEED to think about this topic, because they’re right as a matter of course.
“…if you’re against sexism just stop classifying people by sex..”
Exactly, And if you’re against rape, just stop denying yet one more glass of wine. Here, have another.
BKiSA @5, yeah it always puzzles me why people throw that out as if it’s a bad thing. When it gets thrown at me in real life, I just pause for a moment, smile quizzically and ensuite whether the person supports rape (no), discrimination against people because of colour (no), sexulality (no), etc etc. At some point they either break or I get bored and suggest that since we agree on all these things, surely they are also SJW’s? After all…
It’s ridiculously easy to seize the high ground because they either have to agree with you or out themselves as some form of bigot. Which quite a few do.
I call people like Shermer Social Injustice Warriors (SIW)..
Its trivial, at best, to notice that ‘anti-racists’ CAN be heavily ‘racialist.’
We run into that with, for example, the thugs trying to silence Maryam. But who died and left some special authority to evaluate the Right Level of Talk to Shermer?
Would he agree with someone making a similar suggestion about Pakistani atheists and their atheism? Genuinely unsure at this point.
But sex is a natural category, we can’t avoid it. Race is a social category, a pitical construct, at least in the way it is generally used, so the comparison isn’t very useful.