Objectively intelligent.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by LessinSF

The origins of the game are disputed. Who is least white - asians, persians or arabs? Edited to add that white moving first was not a thing until the late 1800s.

At some later point, this became a thing.

Harder to play if your rook is your king, I would think.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by LessinSF

The origins of the game are disputed. Who is least white - asians, persians or arabs? Edited to add that white moving first was not a thing until the late 1800s.


P.S. - stolen from someone on Facebook, there are no whites in the Bible.

Both the Bible and chess (or at least modern chess's precursors) pre-date the "modern" notion of race.

[Did you just call me Coltrane?]

Originally Posted by LessinSF

While at AIG, I was consulted when two plaintiff PI lawyers were arguing over their fee split of a policy limit settlement. They were both so irrational and argumentative, we filed an interpleader action. I hadn't even thought of the word "interpleader" since my civil procedure class. But I did get to hand deliver a $1 million check to the clerk of the court. And it cost them my attorney's fees, costs, and paying interest to the court.

I had a client/insurer who wanted to pay a large first party property claim, but three siblings all claimed sole ownership of the property, so we didn't know who to pay (and didn't want to pay the wrong person). So I drafted an interpleader, sent the draft to all 3 alleged owners, and said figure this shit out on your own or we're depositing it all with the court. They worked it out.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

Both the Bible and chess (or at least modern chess's precursors) pre-date the "modern" notion of race.

What is the modern concept of race? As opposed to what was the prior thought about it?

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

What is the modern concept of race? As opposed to what was the thought about it?

It’s evolving.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Huh? I’m dumb and I admit it. Chess is for dumb people? What are you saying?

You are dumb. I was saucy enough to have said Eddie Fisher where I meant Bobby Fischer and you didn’t slay me for it? Shame on you.

Chess is rules-based. Rigidly rules based. It’s thinking through loads of possible small outcomes individually or as they might come together in a bigger strategy.

But it’s not really as great an indicator of broader intelligence as people assume, as most decisions in life don’t involved such limited, fixed potential moves. If there aren’t established rules, or you include the option of bending or ignoring rules, chess thinking becomes ineffective.

You can see this at work in our politics. There were rules. Gingrich threw out the rules. But a lot of people are still attempting to follow the old rules, and they seem confused by the idea that their opponents are not working within that framework.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by LessinSF

Some yes, some no. In this case, it was simply convincing them not to pick a side, and get the company sued. It was the path of least risk, which the VP who made the decision was familiar with.

This is why I refuse to escrow money for anyone. All you need is one dispute over who’s entitled to what and you wind up pissing away time dicking around with motions to pay it into the court. All while your fees are held up.

If I wasn’t required to keep an escrow account I wouldn’t even have one. I only hold it for compliance. Never used.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

We are the problem: https://quillette.com/2020/07/06/arguing-in-america/

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

You are dumb. I was saucy enough to have said Eddie Fisher where I meant Bobby Fischer and you didn’t slay me for it? Shame on you.

Chess is rules-based. Rigidly rules based. It’s thinking through loads of possible small outcomes individually or as they might come together in a bigger strategy.

But it’s not really as great an indicator of broader intelligence as people assume, as most decisions in life don’t involved such limited, fixed potential moves. If there aren’t established rules, or you include the option of bending or ignoring rules, chess thinking becomes ineffective.

You can see this at work in our politics. There were rules. Gingrich threw out the rules. But a lot of people are still attempting to follow the old rules, and they seem confused by the idea that their opponents are not working within that framework.

Picasso learned to paint like a Renaissance realist before he became Picasso! Chess teaches me to think. When I walk in a court room unprepared, for me, it’s like playing chess with a 1 minute limit to move.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Burning the balsa wood temple of Adder’s mind:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/n...alism-religion

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

What is the modern concept of race? As opposed to what was the prior thought about it?

Race wasn't really a thing until it was needed to justify chattel slavery of Africans. Some have traced the concept to 15th century Portugal.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Burning the balsa wood temple of Adder’s mind:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/n...alism-religion

I've no idea why you would want to read either of those two pieces past the first few paragraph, much less share them.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Adder

Race wasn't really a thing until it was needed to justify chattel slavery of Africans. Some have traced the concept to 15th century Portugal.

I think it's more complicated than that.

If Atticus were here, I think he'd tell us race = ethnicity in ancient European times. Germans and Celts were races separate from Romans and Greeks. Skin color wasn't considered any more distinctive than hair color or eye color.

Medieval Islamic thinkers and travelers spent a lot of time wondering if skin color was environmental, and whether a person relocating to sub-Saharan Africa or southern India might get darker over time while someone braving the frosts of the north might get paler. Christians liked to talk about races in biblical terms - descendants of Ham, tribes of Israel. Jews were almost always described as racially as well as religiously distinct in the Christian world. In almost every culture, there was some kind of a civilized/uncivilized distinction that was more important than any racial one and usually didn't correspond to skin color.

My understanding is the change that happens in post-Columbian times may have as much to do with Native Americans brought over to Europe as both slaves and curiosities and with sailors trying to figure out and describe the worlds they were "discovering" populated by many "races" of people as with the African slave trade. Certainly the process by which black slaves traded by first the Portuguese and then the English replaced American Indian, Slavic, Berber and other slaves had a lot to do with the development of race based on color as a concept and particularly with the idea that there was a "black" race that excluded lighter skinned brown folks and was limited to people from sub-Sahara Africa. But I think the idea race is closely tied to color and is inherited and not environmental only really gets established after Linnaeus, though, who was dividing humanity like he was dividing other species and decided that skin color was the most important difference.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Burning the balsa wood temple of Adder’s mind:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/n...alism-religion

Were you convinced by what that author says about the 1619 Project?

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

I've no idea why you would want to read either of those two pieces past the first few paragraph, much less share them.

Because they describe your (and many others') form of radical unthinking:

To insist that the conclusion that the arguer wishes to reach, with its implied corollary commandment, must be accepted by his or her opponent as a premise before the argument begins is not the move of a person who has confidence in their truth. It is the opposite of any form of reasoned argument. It is coercive. Except the people who argue this way claim that they cannot possibly be coercive, because you must accept the premise that they don’t have power—even if they are editing The New York Times Magazine, or threatening to get you fired from your job. You say they can’t have it both ways? They say, why not—and then accuse you of opposing the powerless, which, it turns out, is a form of authority that cannot be trumped.

That describes your argument on white fragility. If one does not agree with the construct you offer, one's view is invalid and only serves to prove the existence of white fragility. You assert no one can engage you intellectually on the subject. Any questioning of the concept must be viewed as being made in bad faith. Any questioning of your assertion it is made in bad faith must also be deemed to have been made in bad faith.

The author of the latter piece I cited gets to the meat of why you and others engage in this behavior: Your ideas are extreme, your ideology is often quite naive, and logic and facts undercut a lot of them. This is why you leap to the argument that anything that questions your antiracist statements is automatically racist.

Taibbi might as well have been writing about you when he cited the silly binary thinking he spotted in DiAngelo's work:

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.

In Adderland, things can only be racist or antiracist. All in or all out.

Except criticism doesn't work that way. Nor does conversation. To have an engaging discussion where we reach greater understanding of DiAngelo's work, or that of any other author, we have to allow it to be tested.

This brings me full circle to the first cite I offered, where the lawyer critiques Americans' penchant for litigating rather than conversing about ideas. He asserts that we do this because we know our ideas have holes in them and cannot withstand criticism. (The ideas themselves are not bad, but people like you embrace their most extreme forms. You cannot merely agree with DiAngelo - you must genuflect in the most severe manner and profess to agree with her 100% on everything, a sentiment I think she would find uncomfortably orthodox.)

DiAngelo has some great ideas. She also wrote some really dumb statements in her book (as any author will, it being impossible to pitch a perfect game over 250 pages regarding a subject so complex). Taibbi has some fair criticisms of her. He also wrote some really dumb and cheap criticisms of her. But what's 100X dumber than anything either of them wrote is to reply to Taibbi, or any other critic, by saying the critic is racist for simply having the temerity to critique someone who is antiracist.

It is better to unpack Taibbi and DiAngelo, and any other writer, thinker, or pundit, rather than shut down discourse regarding them with the silly pavlovian retort, "Racist!"

I cited these articles not because they're exceptional pieces. I cited them because they happen to describe you, and you can learn from them.