John McWhorter

[Keebleman]

Love this guy.  He's an American linguistics professor who is one of the best communicators of an academic discipline I know of.  If linguistics was as sexy a discipline as history or astrophysics - certainly I had very little interest in it until I heard him - he'd be a household name.  As it is he is probably best known for 'controversial' - actually just completely commonsensical - statements about race (nb, he's black).

First heard of him in this interview with Tyler Cowen.  Cowen is the best interviewer ever, and McWhorter's delight in the questioning is obvious.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/john-mcwhorter/

After hearing that I went straight to McWhorter's podcast, Lexicon Valley.  Just him at the mic, with occasional breaks where he plays obscure show tunes and early 20th century pop music that may or may not have some relevance to the topic under discussion.

https://slate.com/podcasts/lexicon-valley

Recently the podcast has switched from Slate to Booksmart (Slate has a successor podcast called Spectacular Vernacular, but the first episode didn't engage me, despite the presence of one of the Johns from They Might Be Giants) but the format is more or less the same.

https://www.booksmartstudios.org/p/introducing-lexicon-valley-with-john

And when I signed up to The Great Courses Plus (now re-branded, rather cringingly, as Wondrium) I was delighted to see he fronts several courses there too.

https://www.wondrium.com/language-families-of-the-world
https://www.wondrium.com/the-story-of-human-language
https://www.wondrium.com/language-a-to-z

Plus he's recently published a book about swearing and has started a blog dedicated to his views on racial matters.

[TrenterPercenter]

Yes I've highlighted him a few times; he is in love being a bit overly controversial for the cameras and suffers from that general ignorance and petulance of right-winger when it comes to actual left politics; but his recent commentary of "The Elect" has been quite good.  It isn't unique to him though and he didn't invent it; there are lots of lefties that have been saying the same for sometime. McWhorter I think has been quite useful in discussing the psychology of it rather than just discussing the unworkable, impractical and destructive impact this has had on leftwing causes and movements.

Outside of this his linguistics stuff is on point and he is a great entertainer and educator.

[Chedney Honks]

Norris McWhorter

[TrenterPercenter]

Just clicked on his Substack again to see what he is up to he really does talk some utter nonsense as well; he's just reviewed Charles Murrays book and it's a car crash from Whorter.  Starts off saying that Murray can't be a racist because his..

...work is too carefully reasoned and too deeply founded on scholarly sources to be dismissed as "racist," except by people whose definition of "racist" is "That which people of the black American race don't like for any reason."

He then goes on to point out that the book's two (highly suggestive of racism John!) themes, that black people are more violent and less intelligent, are not founded on any research.  By the end of the blog he is handwringing and defiantly saying this is a bad book with dodgy shit in it but I'm not going to call him racist because other people like the Elect might.  Not a good look.

Charles Murray is your typical intelligentsia racist that we regularly kick out of the public schools in the UK; he doesn't seem to understand that we have a mini economy based around producing these "clever sounding sciency racist" or "posh racist" to compliment the band of comedy racist & working class feisty racist.  We've as of yet struggled to get "sexy racist" and "sporty racist" off the ground but there has been attempts.

Anyway Mcwhorter says that people will say this; calling Murray racist because they don't like his work for any reason; it's not any reason; it's the reason that it stinks to high heaven of racism; specifically literally historically known racist tropes about race and IQ and the countless anti-Muslim statements and fear-mongering he does that goes way beyond just criticising the fundamentalism is some parts of Islamism.  McWhorter also seems to dance around with some reductionist thinking about races being different; there are some "gray areas" apparently; well yes skin pigmentation and a few other things but for the stuff he is talking about you'll need psychologists and neurobiologists to answer these questions; and we have answers; first off no intelligence isn't a thing it's a test, various tests to be precise, which McWhorter accepts, but then why is he then relating a man-made test of a presumed innate biologically determined quality to race; we don't know what intelligence in any race is let along in a comparative sense that is then applied to genes and still never been found and then to race.  It's complete rubbish and just needs to be left to legitimate psychologists and neurobiologists that actually study the area. 

There is another flaw with this though and it should be obvious; that is that brains are not static they are highly complex changeable and adaptable learning machines; intelligence testing and the concept of intelligence used in the typical arguments here are like bleep tests for a brain,  which belies an incredibly flawed way to think about brains.  Despite, the old adage that "your brain is a muscle" it isn't really, this was only ever meant as a metaphor; whilst genetic "blueprinting" might create physical biological materials based on shape and power (for interacting in a physical world of shape and power) this isn't necessary in the brain; it's "muscle tissue" are synapses and dendrites, it's true power in access and recall to short and lower memory stores and often forgotten but essential regulation of emotional states.  What we see in brains is far from evolving to be determined by genetic information they have evolved to allow them to be highly adaptive environmental learners that releases them from the genetic determinism of the rest of the body; this isn't some wilful thinking; it's what the evidence shows us; from the long ex-utero maturation of the brain, too the evolutionary footprint of collective brain structures to the not one but two large scale episodes of synaptic pruning that occur in childhood; if you brain is set up to do one major thing it's is to not be determined at birth.  Ironically it is the main that has made us so successful as humans yet there appears to be this abundance of us that seem to ignore this fact whilst going on about people not passing some silly test first envisioned by some 19th century eugenicist racist.


https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-charles-murrays-new-book-is-his

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Spurned like so much Wodan's Day parkin.

[pancreas]

Why the fuck is this guy not a full professor?

Oh.

[ProvanFan]

McWhorter's original

[Ian Drunken Smurf]

Roy Corstle

[Satchmo Distel]

Interviewed by Chris Hayes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awg_3px5Siw&ab_channel=MSNBC

His anti-PC schtick seems to be quite banal culture wars stuff TBH, and of course there's an implied old double standard as to which left-wing speech should be protected versus a far larger pool of right-wing free speech he wants to protect.

[Keebleman]

John McWhorter has emailed me!  We've had an email exchange, emails have been exchanged!  And no, none of them said, "Contact me again and I'll get the police." Not on either side. 

A Zimbabwean colleague of mine had told me his native language is Shona, which of course I had never heard of, and it got me thinking about whether there is a way to quickly learn about a language, should you happen to meet a native speaker who also speaks your own language and is happy to chat.  I wondered if Professor McWhorter might have some standard questions that enable him to get a sense of an unfamiliar language's character.  He has spoken on his podcast about occasions where he had overheard someone chatting in an obscure tongue and had briefly quizzed them about it.  So I found his Columbia University email and dropped him a message.  He replied within two hours!  And then when I replied to thank him, mentioning my Shona-speaking colleague, he came back to me straight away: "Ask him how many past tenses it has." 

Two emails in one evening from an internationally renowned academic!  cf My boss, who takes at least 24 hours to get back to me on the simplest query.

Oh, and the answer to my query, does he have any way of getting a quick idea of a language, was no, he doesn't.  And I asked my colleague about the past tenses of Shona, and he said there was just one.  So I'm a bit puzzled why the Prof asked me to ask him.  I thought he knew the answer and it would be something surprising, like none or dozens.

[Mr_Simnock]

John McWhorter has emailed me!  We've had an email exchange, emails have been exchanged!  And no, none of them said, "Contact me again and I'll get the police." Not on either side. 

A Zimbabwean colleague of mine had told me his native language is Shona, which of course I had never heard of, and it got me thinking about whether there is a way to quickly learn about a language, should you happen to meet a native speaker who also speaks your own language and is happy to chat.  I wondered if Professor McWhorter might have some standard questions that enable him to get a sense of an unfamiliar language's character.  He has spoken on his podcast about occasions where he had overheard someone chatting in an obscure tongue and had briefly quizzed them about it.  So I found his Columbia University email and dropped him a message.  He replied within two hours!  And then when I replied to thank him, mentioning my Shona-speaking colleague, he came back to me straight away: "Ask him how many past tenses it has." 

Two emails in one evening from an internationally renowned academic!  cf My boss, who takes at least 24 hours to get back to me on the simplest query.

Oh, and the answer to my query, does he have any way of getting a quick idea of a language, was no, he doesn't.  And I asked my colleague about the past tenses of Shona, and he said there was just one.  So I'm a bit puzzled why the Prof asked me to ask him.  I thought he knew the answer and it would be something surprising, like none or dozens.

You have given him something to do outside of counting brown people going passed his window

[TrenterPercenter]

You have given him something to do outside of counting brown people going passed his window

Just to check; you do know that John McWhorter is brown himself.

[Albert Soviets]

Saw the name, mistook him for that horse racing bloke who dressed up as Sherlock Holmes. Turns out that was some other bloke. I'll google him later.

[zomgmouse]

you thought John McWhorter was John McCririck. stupendous

[Mister Six]

I think he's Norris McWhirter.

[TrenterPercenter]

Relevant to the discussion also in the GamerGate thread

I good alternative to McWhorter is this philosophy professor; he deals with some of the themes that McWhorter does but grounds "wokeism" as a response to perceived and real rightwing aggression (which seems the responsible thing to be doing) he is worth a listen to for anyone interested in this stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp7aSJ-q4h4

[Video Game Fan 2000]

That guy has a good video on Hegel.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

The problem with critiquing "wokeness" is that the more sincere your critique is, the more you're likely to share the aims of what's called "woke" and therefore less likely to risk putting out arguments that could be misinterpretted or taken in bad faith.

I've posted criticism of privilege theory here, but I'd never do that on Twitter or social media or anywhere I'd want to give ammunition to cunts. I think people with genuine problems with privilege theory, intersectionality, standpoint epistemology, unconscious bias, etc. are more likely to take their issues to purely academic places not out of fear of the woke mob, but due to not wanting to add to the anti-woke anthill.

[TrenterPercenter]

So this is what both Moeller and the non-mad bit of McWhorter is saying (and McWhorter for very different reasons than Moeller) that wokeness isn't defined by its progressiveness; it occupies progressiveness and can be progressive but why don't we just call this leftwing or progressive?  Woke quite ironically is a term appropriated from Leadbelly, by white people on social media, it occupies a signifier and profile of an individual that is awake to prejudice; yet again quite ironically a lot of black activists involved in the BLM are quite clear that they don't want white people making signifiers and occupying the moment.  As we move further away from catalysts of the movement we are sadly being left with white people appropriating wokeness and other white people calling other white people woke disparagingly.  As predicted this would drown everything else out.

Wokeism now largely in the UK population is synonymous with irrational, inflexible, unreflective individuals that would rather scream at people than communicate and garner support (we'll clap people taking the knee because it is very easy but we are not keen on the term woke).  It is intolerant to criticism as Moeller points out because self-evident bedrock axioms and therefore has morphed into a civil religion (hmmm I think sadly that this is probably giving it too much credit as it is more a trend that has already began to fade though I think question "how do you have progressive politics that avoids sharing too many features with civil religions" is the question that needs honestly answering.  I'm not saying this is the fault of a certain part of the left; the rightwing and the centrists made the trap and walked people into it.  It is also not the end of the world; there are salvageable things from it all and they didn't spring this trap without and losses but to actualise those losses into gains a much more flexible inclusive form of movement will have to be formed (this will happen eventually due to socialism or barbarism but there are also massive distorting risks that occur in that process - nearly always resulting in quite bad outcomes for the left and minorities).

[Captain Z]

RIP

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I think question "how do you have progressive politics that avoids sharing too many features with civil religions"

The problem is the "progressive" part. The idea that history and society have locked arms and are going in one particular direction, and we can divide people into "good" and "bad", or "left" and "right", based on whether they're working to help society on its natural course to a post-historical liberal disneyland or trying to retard progress. SJWs v GamerGate, Boomers v Zoomers, Pragmatic Center v Class Politics: same piss different bottle.

Lots of people online believe this, thinking its called "Marxism" and trumpet being progressive as "the right side of history", when its nothing but whig history wearing a new coat. Radical liberals were the real accelerationists all along. So many broken eggs and not an omelette to show.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

If you're seriously a socialist, marxist, socdem, left libertarian, eco activist, feminist or anything like it, you shouldn't be a progressive - you should want immediate discontinuity. We weren't going any where in particular.

"the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" is a statement about history and resistance, not history and progress.

[TrenterPercenter]

Sure but wants and getting what you want are two different things.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

A lot of "victories" of the 20th century - the establishment of the NHS, contraception and abortion reform, open higher ed, the civil rights movement and gay rights - were harshy discontinuous and abrupt changes to the political order. They were shocks to the system and not incremental improvements.

The progress/liberal thing has been to recontextualise them as part of the march of progress, and recontextualise those who opposed them as opponents of progress rather than defenders of the status quo.

When leftists describe themselves as having a progressive program or agenda, I think they should be clear about what that implies. And be careful about what ideology they're buying into.

Part of the reason the NHS could be dismantled so effortlessly is that after it was established, it was re-positioned not as a radical project and a bodyblow to the Malthusian ideologies of UK politics, but the natural consequence of a consensus that had been assembling for decades. Which ideologically seperates those served by the NHS from the reality of its founding. I think the paradox is that the more you tell people things were just inevitable products of historical progress, the easier it is to take them away. You could maybe make the same point about reproductive healthcare and access to it in the states.

[chveik]

yes i despair a bit when people talk about the 'right side of history' as if things couldn't go sour very quickly if people don't actually fight for material changes.

i hear what Trenter is saying but i would say no one calls themselves woke anymore other than ironically and you have to be careful as not to use it as an insult because a lot of dipshits are doing that now, and because it often tends to lump together actual leftists and privileged libs at the same time. i also feel that some people use some outrageous examples of woke behaviour as a way to justify themselves to become conservative. it seems impossible to discuss this stuff in the current climate, the hot takes industry seems to create a lot of wealth and even the most asinine leftist argument gets sneered at the mainstream media (which some people take as proof that the working class is way more right wing than it actually is)

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I think the lesson is that between amassing small victories and aiming for radical, extra-parliamentary change doesn't have to be an either/or.

The right has never played by those rules. It never has to worry if its cultural agenda will be upset by too much focus on economics, or if too much incremental change will alienate radicals. It just does what it wants to do.

I think the huge mistake is that the role of HR and NGOs in "woke-ism" early on set the right's terms in stone very early on - that its all about cultural change. Which doesn't accurately reflect the beliefs of most left-leaning people, just a certain slice of the upper middle class who work in education and media. I think in general people are more concerned with reparations, student debt and health care than cultural appropriation and #representationwins. But those aren't the people who get book deals or guardian bylines.

[Johnny Foreigner]

McWhorter is a vocal critic of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. In The Language Hoax, he outlines his opposition to the notion that "language channels thought".

Hardly anyone accepts the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis these days, not even cognitivists.

McWhorter has also been a proponent of a theory that various languages on the island of Flores underwent transformation because of aggressive migrations from the nearby island of Sulawesi,

Yes, that's how language contact works.

and he has joined scholars[who?] who contend that English was influenced by the Celtic languages spoken by the indigenous population and which were then encountered by the Germanic invaders of Britain.[14]

Otherwise known as the Celtic Substrate, this is hardly a controversial idea and, in fact, highly likely. See the case of tag questions and aspectuality.

He has also written various pieces for the media that argue that colloquial constructions, such as the modern uses of "like" and "totally," and other non-standard speech should be considered alternative renditions of English rather than degraded ones.[15]

As is a standard view amongst linguists and anything but an original thought.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Hardly anyone accepts the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis these days, not even cognitivists.

Literature, media studies and aesthetics send their apologies.

[FiremanJim]

One of my absolute heroes. I don't know anything about his linguistic work, but politically speaking I don't think I've ever heard him say anything I disagree with, and I can't think of another commentator I can say that of.