Welcome to this week’s roundup!
In these types of posts, I’ll share the inspiration behind last week’s comics as well as some recommended content to satiate your intellectual curiosity or just for entertainment.
Last Week’s Comics
1. Cat Fragility
You may have seen a lot of references to White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo lately. See, you need to accept that white savior, DiAngelo, knows our thoughts and experiences better than we do. Luckily, if we just pay her $12,000 (not including travel costs and lodging), she’ll generously explain how all white people are inherently racist.
Don’t even bother trying to defend against the accusation of racism, DiAngelo has already written that into her book as a key symptom of being racist. Brilliant, right? Also, since white people hold “social and institutional power over people of color” regardless of their socioeconomic statuses or experiences, then it’s also up to white people to fix everything, following DiAngelo’s lead of course. We obviously can’t ever expect people of color to take personal accountability for their outcomes.
Reeling with disgust yet? Ben Shapiro does a fantastic analysis of the book that cuts straight through the bullshit.
I took it upon myself to create an updated version of White Fragility that has been revised to more accurately reflect its concepts:
2. Words Matter
This comic was inspired by the effort by Twitter engineers to use more inclusive language in their code, as well as PETA’s attempts to push more animal-friendly idioms.
Aside from being a colossal waste of time, especially on Twitter’s part (alas, the noble work that Silicon Valley engineers are getting paid 6 figures to do), this is at least mildly insulting to anyone who they think would be offended by the original language or phrasing and an implementation of “safe space” ridiculousness in the real world.
If Twitter is willing to go through this level of speech cleanup on the backend, we’d be foolish to think they wouldn’t do the same on the frontend. But anyway, we’ll just have to “take the flower by its thorns” on this one…
3. Cancel Cancel Culture
Harper released an open letter calling for an end to cancel culture that resulted in… additional attempted cancellations and the withdrawal of support from signatories of the letter once they realized that people they disagreed with had also signed the letter. But wasn’t that the initial point of the letter though—so much for bravery?
Better yet, many denied the existence of cancel culture. Perhaps we need a new open letter signed by those who oppose cancelling cancel culture.
Nonetheless here we are. Cancel culture… that which cannot be cancelled and will cancel all who attempt to cancel it.
3 More Things to Enjoy:
This Twitter Thread - Parody SJW account @TitaniaMcGrath strikes again with a comprehensive list of everything that is problematic and racist in our society.
This Interview - James Lindsay, founder of New Discourses, joins Joe Rogan on his podcast to discuss the anti-intellectual trend on the left, including how Lindsay managed to use woke buzzwords to get nonsense published in multiple prominent feminist publications.
This Book - Loserthink by Scott Adams is a worthwhile read on how easy it is for anyone to exemplify unproductive ways of thinking and how we can fix that.