Sigh. Not this crap again.
Read this & gasp. So…we should abandon Dr. King's dream & return to judging people by the color of their skin instead of their character? pic.twitter.com/IniWeMAdST
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) June 28, 2017
Sigh. Not this crap again.
Read this & gasp. So…we should abandon Dr. King's dream & return to judging people by the color of their skin instead of their character? pic.twitter.com/IniWeMAdST
— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) June 28, 2017
Comments
11 responses to “Read this and gasp”
I’ll bet he doesn’t see a problem with “I don’t see you as black, I just see you as a regular person.”
There are criticisms aplenty to be made of identity politics, but clueless Shermer isn’t capable of making them.
He’s too busy making ones like this instead.
God it’s tedious. Why are there so many of these smug mediocrities?
He’s genuinely dumb.
Two or three people replying to Shermer’s moronistic moronism have made excellent, substantial challenges (using that medium). One person going by the name of explanationpoint wrote, “Have you ever read anything Dr. King wrote or just isolated quotes and soundbites?” Shermer, of course, will never reply. Anther poster by the name of Adam Lockett has pointed out, again and again and again, hey, guess what! Racism exists! Shermer’s bros don’t get it.
I have a perverse urge to re-read one of his books. I’m fairly sure I will implode with rage by the end of the dedication. I can’t remember much about them. I seem to recall him spending a lot of pages explaining how he’s better at riding bikes than everyone else or something. He seemed to make some kind of sense at the time, I can’t believe I was such an idiot.
I’ve often thought about this. While there are a number of factors that can play a role, I think the two most important are self-awareness and self-assuredness. The two are related quite strongly in most people.
If your self-awareness is impaired in any significant way, you just don’t realise how little you actually understand and how facile your ideas or proposal may be. What seems like the profound answer to everything a more self-aware person recognises as being a half formed thought based in an absence of critical knowledge, understanding or interpretation. In other words, the more self-aware a person is the more likely they are to understand the fuzzy border of the known-unknowns and the unknown-unknowns. This makes even a reasonably self-aware person reluctant to publicly proclaim on issues.
This feeds strongly into the second factor. Having even a modicum of understanding of your limitations tends to define a boundary to your self-confidence and how assured you can be publicly pronouncing on matters. People listening to politicians and ‘thought leaders’ seldom actually know much about any given topic and they like it when someone they have chosen to listen to makes firm declarations that X is Y, especially when this confirms an underlying prejudice or belief. A person who actually understands the limitations of their knowledge and who gives a damn about truth, accuracy and knowledge, seldom sounds so self-assured and black and white.
Re #5: He may come off of a re-read better looking than you fear. It’s not necessarily that the books were/are bad and we missed it – it can just be that they were largely concerned with topics where he really could exercise skeptical judgment without his personal blinders getting in the way. It’s “only” when he’s thinking about social or economic justice or politics (does that cover it? I’m not watching his Twitter for whatever else he may be spewing) that he quits thinking and keeps talking without ever realizing it.
Well, I’ve always thought his books were meh and over-rated and that his personal smugness wafted up off the pages like smog. That was long before all these quarrels and disagreements.
Dear Mr Shermer,
It is possible to recognize that a person has dark skin and understand that the system is stacked against such people, and still judge them solely by the content of their character.
This really isn’t difficult.
@Ophelia #8:
Yeah, that’s the taste I have in my mouth thinking about them. The books seemed logical enough at the time but didn’t really teach me anything. Preaching very much to the choir with Shermer as the priest. The cool, skateboarding priest who is totally down with the kids.
@E Harper #9: “This really isn’t difficult.”
It isn’t, is it? It seems much harder to take away what Shermer did from that text than what you and I did.
I’ve read a bit of Shermer. Before his misogyny and drunken escapades were ‘out.’ I could nod along with him on a lot of themes, but from the very start, his ingrained Libertarian anarchism undermined just about everything.
His personal pathology is entwined with his toxic ideological commitment.