On Critical Race Theory, Condoleeza Rice Couldn’t Be More Wrong
“Our classrooms are not sites of demoralized children who hate themselves and their country. Students are hungry for explanations — real explanations — for the world they have inherited…”
URSULA WOLFE-ROCCA and
CHRISTIE NOLD from:
In a recent interview, Condoleeza Rice was asked about her view of Critical Race Theory.
Here’s her take on CRT:
Here’s my question:
If historical fact and truth have the capacity or potential to hurt their feelings or make some students squeamish, should such facts and truths be subject to censorship and removed and barred from classrooms?
03/05/2023 @ 12:05 pm
Ugh. Ron. Don’t make me listen to Condoleeza Rice. Please. Enough is enough.
“If historical fact and truth have the capacity or potential to hurt their feelings or make some. students squeamish, should such facts and truths be subject to censorship and removed and barred from classrooms?”
Cutting straight to your question then. Anti-‘woke’ people are making a false charge with regard to the hurt white feelings thing. Personally, I was incensed, not hurt, after reading The 1619 Project. No one taught me this basic United States history in high school. How dare they? I was not squeamish, but horrified. It felt like when we read All Quiet on the Western Front, about terrible and gut-wrenching slaughter of innocents. Let’s never do that again is the take away. Which is exactly what they fear most. White people who won’t have it.
What the anti-‘woke’ crowd doesn’t get is that young people already know this history. Race and gender are a non-issue when they socialize. They are politically active, and not in the way Ron DeSantis would like. They are particularly anti-gun, after years of school shootings and in class shooter drills. They vandalize monuments to enslavers and other dubious historic celebrities. Two former students (both A students whom I’m quite proud of) have been part of the crew that infamously vandalizes the Christopher Columbus statue here for the past several years, right before Indigenous Peoples Day. Last year, they finally lopped his head off completely and carted it away. Rather than repair the statue yet again, the city took it down.
Veering a little off topic, I am excited to see POC featured more and more prominently in the media. DeSantis has no idea how the normalization of Black excellence will change things. HBO has a section dedicated to Black programming and film. I have been working my way through it, and the funniest show I have ever seen is a show called South Side. I laugh so hard I almost choked on my soup one night. If you have HBO and haven’t seen it, 5 stars. Also highly recommended: Abbott Elementary, Black Lady Sketch Show, and of course, the amazing Issa Rae’s Insecure.
03/05/2023 @ 12:33 pm
In electoral politics, there is a tactic where one candidate defines the other candidate, and then the race is spent within the rhetorical parameters that the defining candidate determines. Donald Trump did a version of this with his nicknames. It’s amazing how childish, and effective this tactic can be. And this is precisely what has happened to ‘Critical Race Theory’.
It was originally critical legal studies. Somewhere along the line it began to be discussed by the familiar title that we see bandied about in the press today. It was either a huge blunder by proponents or genius by opponents. You can see elements of the strategy, and the results. Insert the word ‘race’ and the conversation loses its rationality.
Once everyone has the word ‘race’ in their heads, the separate parties divide along emotionally drawn lines. With that accomplished, it turns into a new game. “Critical Race Theory” becomes a coin, dare I say, token, to mortify or mollify the various parties, in an effort to gain favor for something else. Two things have been accomplished now. The discussion of {critical legal studies} has been poisoned, and is circumvented, like East Palestine Ohio after the railroad explosion. Love it or hate it, no one wants to be there now. Condoleeza Rice is a smart, educated woman. She knows what Critical Legal Studies/Critical Race theory is, yet, she discusses as the Right wants it discussed, to mollify proponents of systemic racism.
It occurs to me that a better way to discuss it, having now lost the “Critical Legal Studies” title is to not discuss the theory as a theory. All our intellectually somnambulant American mass culture hears is blah, RACE…blah, blah. They don’t give a Tinker’s damn about “critical”, and they surely don’t want to discuss a “theory”. My view is that the issue can be discussed by discussing the facts, and thus, a theory is constructed and understood.
I learned about the Tulsa Oklahoma race massacre of 1921 just a few years ago. (More than a few, and fewer than ten years ago). And, where there is the smoke of turpentine bombs, there is the fire of systemic oppression. If there was an incident where fire was used to massacre a population, there are likely more. Humans are social creatures and such things are learned and repeated. Like the four elements of our ancient understanding of the Earth, there can be found incidents from history which used fire, earth, wind, and water to systematize oppression. It helps that Tulsa was relatively recent, as compared to the slave trade. It shocks the conscience to come to understand that we did not know of this event, because of the effective embargo of its existence. Further still, wind and water, in the form of climate redlining, and incidents like Katrina and the Lower 9th in New Orleans, give an even more recent example of how the poor, and disproportionately black and brown populations are affected by severe weather.
All of the aspects of ‘critical race theory’ are present in our very real, very current issues, in search of solutions. All the while, no use the the term “critical race theory” is necessary, nor would it be available, to Condoleeza Rice, and others like her who want to task the oppressed with just taking a different attitude about their oppression, so as not to upset their oppressor.
03/05/2023 @ 2:33 pm
I learned about Tulsa from a teaching assistant, about ten years ago, same as Bitey, long after I should have learned about it in high school. Bitey is correct; there were many other Tulsas, several are detailed in The 1619 Project.
The Tulsa community was Black professionals: doctors, businesspeople, store owners, lawyers, people with nice homes and good income, self-sufficient, not beholden to white people, especially irksome to whites with less wealth and fewer accomplishments. This is still true.
Re: Condoleeza Rice, Candace Owen, Herschel Walker, et. al. Systemically oppressed Black people sold one another out, then and now. Again, tons of details in The 1619 Project. Selling out was for mercenary reasons, for privilege, for importance. POC for Trump are as deluded as women for Trump. They don’t seem to get that they are mocked and despised, same as Michelle Obama when they called her ‘an ape in heels’, one of the most beautiful first ladies since Jackie Kennedy. This too is a part of systemic oppression, people thinking that supporting their oppressors somehow makes them better/more successful.
03/05/2023 @ 4:14 pm
I agree. The timing of our responses made it appear I took issue with yours/”1619 project.” It was merely a coincidence. My reason for mentioning the preference for recent and current injustices is that is circumvents one of the most often used dodges, that being, ‘I wasn’t there then’…and its specious spawn, ‘racism has ended.’
03/05/2023 @ 5:40 pm
Bitey The 1619 Project includes current topics-it’s about the legacy of slavery on the present day. The book version (as opposed to the NYTimes magazine) is a lengthy read, more than 800 pages. I could only read about twenty pages at a sitting then had to put it aside for a few days. It’s very difficult. Nikole Hannah-Jones divides topics like justice, music, housing, etc. into 18 essays, plus several dozen poems and works of fiction, each written by someone prominent and with expertise on that topic. The list of contributors reads like a Black who’s who of academics, writers, and artists– the usual suspects, but also writers many I’d never read. It’s all in there, Katrina, Tulsa, redlining and interstate highways that cut Black communities in half, and as they say, plenty more.
The essay that most broke my heart tells about a young enslaved woman poet. Her poetry was beautiful. She died at age 33. Nikole Hannah-Jones invited a recognized contemporary Black woman poet to write that chapter, and she writes a letter and a poem to the woman. Wait…I’ll go look both up….here:
“Pretend I was there with you, Phillis, when you asked in a letter to no one: How many iambs to be a real human girl?/Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart?” Read writer and sociologist Eve Ewing’s poem about Phillis Wheatley, a 20-year old enslaved woman in Boston in 1773 who became the first African-American to publish a book of poetry, one of the featured literary works.
And as long as I was on the site, here’s a list of the contributors:
Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander • Michelle Alexander • Carol Anderson • Joshua Bennett • Reginald Dwayne Betts • Jamelle Bouie • Anthea Butler • Matthew Desmond • Rita Dove • Camille T. Dungy • Cornelius Eady • Eve L. Ewing • Nikky Finney • Vievee Francis • Yaa Gyasi • Forrest Hamer • Terrance Hayes • Kimberly Annece Henderson • Jeneen Interlandi • Honorée Fanonne Jeffers • Barry Jenkins • Tyehimba Jess • Martha S. Jones • Robert Jones, Jr. • A. Van Jordan • Ibram X. Kendi • Eddie Kendricks • Yusef Komunyakaa • Kevin M. Kruse • Kiese Laymon • Trymaine Lee • Jasmine Mans • Terry McMillan • Tiya Miles • Wesley Morris • Khalil Gibran Muhammad • Lynn Nottage • ZZ Packer • Gregory Pardlo • Darryl Pinckney • Claudia Rankine • Jason Reynolds • Dorothy Roberts • Sonia Sanchez • Tim Seibles • Evie Shockley • Clint Smith • Danez Smith • Patricia Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Bryan Stevenson • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Natasha Trethewey • Linda Villarosa • Jesmyn Ward
03/05/2023 @ 5:52 pm
I’m aware.
Perhaps I should say it like this. When I wrote my first response, I had not yet read yours. What appears to be a reference to you in the original is just the result of a time overlap.
03/05/2023 @ 6:12 pm
then as Gilda Radner used to say, “never mind”…..
Will say that often when I try to tell people about the book, they assume it’s about the history of slavery. Which it partly is. Yet it’s the legacy part that pisses off white people, who say as you said, “I wasn’t there”. Yes, well, you’re here now, and you voted for Trump and don’t understand that systemic racism is alive and enjoying a public renaissance, and you just voted for it.
03/05/2023 @ 7:29 pm
Yep.
We are living in an age of denial of reality. Racism has been battled by its opponents from the founding of this country. The pushback against the fight against racism has some things in common across eras. One of the things in common is the denial of the existence of racism. The more things change, the more the denial stays the same. One of the most pernicious aspects of the denial is the claim of the social ill predating the individual drawing dividends from society’s investment in a systemic code and structure.
Racism lends itself to being misunderstood and dodged as a concept. Being about to turn 60 this year, my life spans watching an American saint assassinated for his ministry, to the vilification of BLM, by means of an intentional misunderstanding of the plea built into the name. Detractors take it to mean that lives other than Black lives do not matter. It is an evil, nihilistic approach which is bound to succeed. Every aspect of the concept of social justice/racial justice is vulnerable to the same approaches, year in and century out. I no longer expect society to generally reject racism in concept, and as a matter of principle. Too many stand to benefit from the dividends that they receive.
My final loss of innocence was the realization that a good, rational thought placed next to a false concept will not always be chosen. As such, education and understanding only go so far. Civilization can’t depend on reason, and the conceptual understanding of reality. Civilization needs to command the brass tacks holding the actual fabric of society, rather than waiting for benevolent souls to understand that their conduct contributes to or detracts from the Aristotelian “good”. Aristotle was right that the concept exists, but for “the good” to be realized, ‘brass tacks’ have to be manufactured.
03/05/2023 @ 8:25 pm
Humans aren’t born racist, they’re bred. I used to run an art and nature camp for Audubon. Put a bunch of six year olds together, and they play freely, make art, and love frogs and bugs. Put a bunch of ten year olds together, and they’re cliquish and opinionated. Someone’s always a bully. Someone’s always a pariah. Someone always tries to stomp on the bugs. They’ll never be like six year olds again.
When you give six year olds crayons and paper, everybody draws with enthusiasm, wonderful creative original imagery. Four years later, most will say I can’t draw, and point to one kid who everyone agrees can draw, yet I can’t see why. What happens?
One historic factoid I didn’t learn until Hannah-Jones’s book is that twelve of the first eighteen presidents were slave owners. Wtf? How could the constitution possibly be about equality and liberty for all when the people who wrote it were highly invested in continued enslavement? This false picture of our greatness continues to drive MAGA. Great for them, sure. POC, women, LGBTQ, not so much.
03/05/2023 @ 9:18 pm
Imagine life without sugar. We take it for granted. Some of us try to go without it for health purposes, but most of us don’t. Sugar is a pretty easy sell. Around the founding of this country, sugar was still a luxury item. And I’m pretty sure we weren’t making it from sugar beets yet. It was made from cane. And growing and harvesting sugar cane is a ridiculously arduous, and dangerous industry. No one wanted to do it, yet, it brought a healthy profit. Enslaving humans was the answer. A lot of the founding fathers enslaved people because it made them money.
Power and ethics are always at odds. Power does not tend to corrupt. It always corrupts. The use of power is corruption in action. Money is a nearly pure source of power.
This country has never been about the ideals that were were taught. This country has always been about freedom for white men to make lots of money without interference from a monarch. All the other stuff is in support of that fundamental fact.
As for babies and racism, it is true that they are not born racist. They are also not born carpenters. But, as they age and grow, they take on more complex challenges and and more complex motivations. They learn to use hammers and saws in order to build structures. They learn racism in order to maintain walls. Racism is a tool, and not a condition of the heart. It is used to make people wealthy, feel safe, important, and even holy.
03/06/2023 @ 8:00 am
Kara’s sugar sphinx
03/06/2023 @ 8:01 am
Kehinde Wiley’s Rumor of War
03/06/2023 @ 9:38 am
The Portland, Oregon Audubon Society is changing its name due to the racist history of the man himself. Others are expected to follow.
I only knew he catalogued and painted birds, but learned about this over the weekend:
03/06/2023 @ 9:55 am
And in addition to being racist, he’d go into the field, shoot bagfuls of birds, dozens and dozens and dozens, bring them back to the studio, rig them up into ‘lifelike’ poses, and draw them. This is why if you look at the Birds of North America, many look exactly like what they were, dead birds with broken necks and rigor mortis, strung up with wire.
He’s long horrified me for both nastinesses. It’s true that pre-camera, that’s how natural history illustration was made, but killing hundreds of birds in order to do it wasn’t. Taking his name off a good and beneficial org is akin to taking the Sackler name off art institutions imho.
03/06/2023 @ 10:02 am
Owls, from Birds of North America
03/06/2023 @ 10:19 am
P.S. worth mentioning, is that most Audubon chapters have changed their names, starting a couple of years ago, DC and NY first, as might be expected, but dominoed to most states. Like Martha Stewart says, a good thing!
Also, worth mentioning if you’re into burds, Drew Lanham, wrote an amazing memoir about being a Black ornithologist, also Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant’s podcast Going Wild. I think it’s free on PBS. Good stuff for bird lovers 🙂
03/06/2023 @ 7:58 am
Kara Walker is a prominent Black artist who explores gender, race, and identity. She created a powerful and indelible work out of sugar, a monumental forty foot tall sphinx with a mammy face, a central part of an installation in the Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn before it was demolished. It’s incredible, I don’t even know how to talk about it, so you might google if interested. Not sure of the title….brb…hah! It’s long:
‘A Subtlety’, also known as the ‘Marvelous Sugar Baby’, subtitled an ‘Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant’
Kehinde Wiley is also enjoying the view from the top rung on the ladder of artist fame. Wiley’s the artist who painted Obama’s portrait. White people are all he’s so great, how wonderful, just love him, yet many have no idea what the rest pf his work is about. Obama knew though, and I love him even more, if that’s possible, for inserting Wiley into the forever canon at the National Gallery. Maybe you remember Rumors of War, the statue he dropped temporarily into Times Square, a huge bronze of a Black man sitting atop a horse, wearing a hoodie and locs, posed like a war general ready for battle.
Something that seems to have fanned racist fire is this kind of cultural attention. Nobody was supposed to know about sugar, just cotton, and only a little. Art wasn’t supposed to celebrate Black excellence or experience, yet despite racist spittle, Amy Sherrod and Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker are now equals to Banksy and Warhol, all top shelf art history level artists. No wonder DeSantis wants to get Toni Morrison out of the library. Have you read her? She’s the one who knocked my head off in college and I’ve not been the same since.
Okey doke, I have to get to work today. But good ranting with ya.
03/08/2023 @ 8:03 pm
…how can the American dream runaway…?
03/08/2023 @ 10:01 pm
White flight!
03/09/2023 @ 11:43 am
… walking now …
03/10/2023 @ 5:50 pm
VenusJupiter
03/12/2023 @ 3:45 pm
Bitey’s right about money driving everything. That’s the most important thing Marx taught us and was right about. The American Revolution was about landowners not having a say in the way they were taxed. It was about profits.
It still is. The middle class standard of living in America hasn’t risen since the Nixon administration. It hasn’t fallen as much as it might because in the seventies households added a second wage earner to keep up. Leaving kids without a parent in the house was blamed on feminism but it was really about economic necessity.
A little while back I looked up two numbers because I got curious. The numbers are the increase in American population since Nixon and the increase in American GDP. For the middle class to see no gains, the numbers should be similar, growth to keep up with population. Not quite. The population was multiplied by approximately 1.5. GDP was multiplied by approximately 13. If that doesn’t tell you most of what you have to know, nothing will.
Someone, it might have been Obama but I don’t remember, said that we’d have been better off calling BLM All Lives Matter. Instead, as Bitey points out, the BLM name got corrupted to be interpreted as Black Lives Matter More rather than the actual Black Lives Matter Too. So now All Lives Matter is also being misinterpreted.
And no, people won’t obviously make the right choice. Someone once said “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”
In the mid eighties when my wife and I owned our first house we had mice. I went out and found Havahart traps at a somewhat remote hardware store. A Havahart trap catches mice live. If you just want to kill them you bait it with D-Con and then you have the dead mouse in a disposable plastic box rather than handling it and if you want to set it free you take it to some woods or something and dump the mouse out. Eventually I could no longer find them. Why do I tell the story? Because “build a better mousetrap” doesn’t even work with actual mousetraps. The same is true of anything and is doubly true of politics. That’s why I keep framing these conversations as sales.
In one way slavery is a red herring. Slavery ended a century and a half ago. The problem is what’s happened since. The problem is that some of these forms of discrimination are ongoing. If you look at any immigrant population, they typically catch up to average America in two generations. The Black population, at least the American slave-descended Black population, hasn’t caught up in six, figuring about twenty-five years per generation. There are reasons for that and there’s a large part of the population that will do anything they can to avoid looking at those reasons.
Maybe they’re afraid their statues will be beheaded. I don’t know. They’re very afraid of the Revenge of People Of Color, not understanding that that’s not in the cards for a whole lot of reasons starting with the fact that people of color don’t want to replace Whites but to join them. I’ve gone into this in detail and I can if anyone wants me to. They’re also afraid it will cost them.
It will cost them, but it won’t cost them what they think, and this isn’t made clear to them. Maybe they don’t deserve to have what I”m about to say made clear to them but if it helps change things I’m in favor of it because I think it’s less important to punish the perpetrators than it is to make them stop. Punishing them isn’t profitable but making them stop is. The way it will cost them is that it will require an obligatory investment. What they fail to realize is that that investment has a financial return – for them.
What happens if a permanent underclass stops being a permanent underclass? In both actual costs and opportunity costs, a permanent underclass is horrifically expensive and the guys on the Right act as though it were free. Very far from it.
Jobs are created by demand. What happens when a significant portion of the population has no disposable income to speak of? That stops us from creating jobs and, in doing so, creating taxpayers – while taking people off public assistance of various kinds – and creating customers with disposable income whose demand creates more jobs and profits and taxpayers. But that’s not all it does.
One characteristic of poor neighborhoods, particularly urban poor neighborhoods, is that the widely available ways to make a decent living are often illegal. That incentivizes crime, both directly and more indirectly in that a criminal environment encourages violence for survival. Crime is insanely expensive: private sector costs involving everything from rising insurance to medical costs to low real estate values to low tourism to jurors and grand jurors having to take time off work; and public sector costs involving enforcement, temporary incarceration, courts and lawyers, longer term incarceration, probation and parole.
In short, the investment has returns. And even if they just break even, they break even with a better, safer, more unified country, not to mention a significantly more humane one.
CRT is important. As usual, we’re doing a terrible job of selling it and people are making political careers based on lying about it. It isn’t the first time and won’t be the last.
03/17/2023 @ 6:13 am
“And now for something completely different…”
Remember that? It is an old gag from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I enjoyed Monty Python. My earliest memories were from late elementary school, and early junior where kids would recite certain skits in outrageously bad English accents. Python cranked up the absurdity to uniquely high levels. One skit followed another with no apparent connection contextually. The confusing psychedelia juxtaposed to the staid British mannerisms and affect made for a fascinating experience. I have an “I’m just a Bill” t-shirt from Schoolhouse Rock. If you know me, you get my little joke there, understanding that my name is Bill. Schoolhouse Rock came from around the same time. The audience was a little different. And the time that the little cartoons player was a little different. The same kids in the same schools recited the skits from the cartoons, but they were kind of…”something completely different.”
If someone were starting into the skit about the dead parrot, or the license for fish, and then someone gave a rejoinder of, “Conjunction Junction” or, “Interjections”, it would cause some consternation. Many of the same kids love both Monty Python and Schoolhouse Rock, but the social ritual of the recitations had a certain context. A conversation of the “dead parrot” involved whether or not the parrot was dead, or just sleeping..or what have you. To respond with a musical reference to how a bill becomes a law is a change of subject…while both are still true. One context competes with the other for attention. And that’s fine. After all, these are just school hall games.
“And now for something completely different…”
Black Lives Matter is not a game. The statement is an assertion that is valid and self contained. It does not owe context to any other point of view. It does not need to be stated differently. Anyone who says it should have been stated differently is objectively wrong. If Barack Obama says it should have been stated as “All Lives Matter”, he is wrong. Barack Obama is as wrong as if someone had said, Edward is a nice name. He should be called Edward Obama. Michelle Obama is a very nice person, but so was Betty White. Obama should have taken Betty White to dinner on his wedding anniversary. St. Patrick’s Day is wonderful. Make sure to wear purple because purple is also nice.
All of these things may be true, but context matters. An immediate retort out of context is a rebuttal. “All lives matter” is certainly true, but in the context within which it arose, it is as offensive as going to a wake and offering a rebuttal. This person mattered. This life mattered. These people matter. If Obama showed up and insisted that others be mentioned as well…I’d remove him from the room, and I like the guy.
03/17/2023 @ 10:22 am
“And now for something completely different…”
“A conversation of the “dead parrot” involved whether or not the parrot was dead, or just sleeping..or what have you. To respond with a musical reference to how a bill becomes a law is a change of subject…”
The extreme right MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives are trying to become adept at changing the subject. However, no matter how hard they try to redirect the conversation, the fact remains, the parrot is still dead…
03/17/2023 @ 12:29 pm
As a visual person, when someone says “all lives matter”, my mind sees a white circus acrobat climb up to stand on the shoulders of a Black acrobat and make that pronouncement while knocking them in the head with their foot.
I am starting to feel so ground down. It’s not just heavy doses of racism. General hatred and actions against women, LGBTQ, academia, Putin good/Zelensky bad, woke stoves, woke banks, woke books. They don’t even bother to understand where ‘woke’ came from. Listening to some Lead Belly would do white lives some good imho, but they prolly wouldn’t get that he’s singing about us.
This week, after a full year of examination, the National Audubon Society board voted to keep their name, even though multiple local chapters across the country have dumped it. Art institutions have and are dumping the Sackler name, so it’s not like no one is doing this, and if anything, the new non-Sackler institutions garner more popular support for doing so. I’ve long known that JJAudubon slaughtered sackfuls and sackfuls of birds in order to reference and paint them, but only last year learned that he was an enslaver and an anti-abolitionist, someone unworthy of admiration if you love people and birds.
All week, the decision felt like a heavy wet blanket I couldn’t shake off. My career was shaped around drawing birds. I worked for Audubon for almost ten years. This year my bird money is going to the 2023 annual Black Birders Week, May 28-June 3. @blackafinstem (IG) or https://www.blackafinstem.com/. They are always looking for supporters. The National Audubon Society won’t miss me. Fuck them.
Also crushing this week: my own naiveté. I commented the gist of my Audubon thoughts on a WaPo article and was overwhelmingly corrected by Audubon supporting commentariat re: all the important environmental good Audubon is doing under that name, work that needs to continue, enslaver or no enslaver. Why can’t they call it American Bird Society or some other neutral name? Bird Lives Matter has a nice ring.
xoxo,
Miss Pissypants
03/17/2023 @ 12:49 pm
P.S. Bird Lives Matter would be bitter sarcasm btw
03/21/2023 @ 2:13 pm
I don’t think that’s what Obama’s suggestion was about, though I do think it was Monday Morning Quarterbacking. I also think the misreading of what BLM means was deliberate.
It wouldn’t be appropriate to start talking about other targets even if the movement had been named All Lives Matter. What some people don’t get is that bigotry is customized. Racism and antisemitism, for example, look radically different from each other, and both look radically different from sexism which in turn looks different from homophobia. This isn’t to say there is no overlap, but there’s a whole lot that doesn’t. What BLM was founded in protest of is not something that any of the other minorities (meaning in the case of women treatment rather than numbers) experience. That’s why talking about other targets wouldn’t be appropriate. One would have to change the subject to do so.
03/18/2023 @ 4:48 am
(if)
‘The Medium is the Massage’, is cybernetics the chaos?
03/18/2023 @ 5:56 am
“(if)
‘The Medium is the Massage’, is cybernetics the chaos?”
JPH; An appropriate response to your question is an emphatic ‘NO’:
The First Law of Cybernetics.
(Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety):
“The complexity of a control system must be equal to or greater than the complexity of the system it controls.” A stable system needs as much variety in the control mechanisms as there is in the system itself.”
“Transmission of information within the nervous system is more complex than the largest telephone exchanges; problem solving by a human brain exceeds by far the capacity of the most powerful supercomputers. These exemplify the two main fields of bionics research—information processing and energy transformation and storage.”
See:
The relation and differences between cybernetics and bionics.
Ricardo da Silva
Chief Digital Guru | Cybernaut | Public…
Published Jul 11, 2022
“Bionics and cybernetics have been called the two sides of the same coin. Both use models of living systems, bionics in order to find new ideas for useful artificial machines and systems, and cybernetics to seek the explanation of living beings’ behavior.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/relation-differences-between-cybernetics-bionics-ricardo-da-silva#:~:text=Bionics%20imply%20the%20design%20of,controlling%20automotive%20processes%20and%20communication.
03/18/2023 @ 6:50 pm
I’ve no renown STEM sheepskin. I am aware that aberrant consequences are too often instigated within the ennui of greed, that fear can and will be imposed to placate the ultimate aphrodisiac: POWER. Our ‘fail safe’ sweat equity and commoditization of sentient species pinnacled with our ‘shop worn’ Mutually Assured Destruction {…} Please be aware that there is smoke in Paris, and we’ve our own pending perp-walk within perfect plastic handcuffs by our former POTUS. While dystopian oligarch Putan perpetuates his implacable facism. Heck, we know more about the Himalayan Jumping Spider than global tranquility. Hey brotherhood all around. STAND DOWN!
03/18/2023 @ 10:42 pm
JPH;
“I’ve no renown STEM sheepskin.”
Neither do I…
03/21/2023 @ 2:06 pm
‘…touch down in the land of the Delta blues…in the middle of the pouring rain….’ Marc Cohn