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Sunday, December 29, 2019

Martians And The Warsaw Uprising

An alliance between all peoples of the Earth to defend ourselves from Martians is what we need now. There is no time to be fighting among ourselves when the real threat, Martians, is so clear and obvious!

That's what I thought when I saw this tweet from Erin Biba.

H/T: Andy Ngo.
Erin describes herself thusly.
Freelance Science Journalist - National Geographic, BBC, Scientific American, NBC News, PopSci, Gizmodo, Earther, Dame, WIRED and others. Fact Checker.
She's clearly no slouch. However, she has fallen prey to the narrative of white supremacists as a threat. I don't believe they're a threat to anyone. In fact, I would bet that there are more academics and journalists studying them than there are actual supremacists. Kind of like the population of some rare songbird compared to the population of birdwatchers looking for them.

The killer argument is in Erin's tweet.
"What we need right now is a way to find solidarity with each other against our shared enemy of white supremacy."
Did the Jewish insurgents in the Warsaw Uprising need a way to find solidarity with each other? Within that community, you know there were mortal enemies. Business deals gone wrong because of lies and cheating, marriages wrecked from adultery, parents whose children had been bullied severely, there simply had to have been Jews in Warsaw who had good reason to hate each other. That's part of the human condition. And yet, the Jews in Warsaw, when they got their hands on weapons, didn't use them on each other. The threat posed by the Nazis was obvious.

The threat posed by white supremacists isn't obvious because it doesn't exist. If it did, alliances between victim groups and within victim groups would naturally arise. You wouldn't need to talk them into being.

On a related note, Baltimore saw it's per capita murder rate record broken yesterday. No white supremacists were involved.

Again, if the external threat was really there, would the members of the oppressed groups be killing each other?

2 comments:

  1. I suspect it's "fact checker" like "body checker"-- you know, slams them from an angle to remove them when they're a threat.

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  2. Less snarky, check out the definitions of "white" that tend to fly around.

    Showing up when you agreed to, following the law, working hard, studying, paying your bills, using formal logic, being Christian in a traditional way, engaging in events where you don't start by sorting folks via appearance or ancestry-- all of these are identified as being "white," and favoring them is "white supremist."

    Which is about as flippin' racist as I can reasonably imagine, insisting that folks who tan can't do stuff that normal humans are totally capable of doing and have for all of recorded history, but hey, logic is raaaaaacist.

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