Greyparrot

For USA, perpetual war as long as the public allows them to do it.

Every dollar spent in Ukraine is 10 percent for the big guy.

Recall that in November 2021, Harris interrupted a NASA presenter who was discussing “climate adaptation strategies” to ask, “Can you, can you measure, um, trees?” By way of explanation, she plowed on: “‘Cause part of that data that you are referring to, and it’s in EJ, environmental justice — that you can also track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighborhood where people live.”

Harris was here reflecting her belief in the socialist race-baiting myth that trees are distributed in a racist manner, which completely ignores both the urban rich and the rural poor. And there is, of course, more racism than just that. As far as Kamala Harris herself is concerned, anyone who notices that she isn’t all that bright is simply, you guessed it, a racist.

My eyes seem to be going faster than my ears as I age. God bless audiobook technology for the age impaired.

Pakman: Good, good. I have to talk to you about Woke and Wokeness. You wrote the  book. It's in the title. One of the things I'm interested in when it comes to the Anti-woke  movement and woke as a cancer or a problem is that there's about a half dozen or more  polls that show that wokeness seems to be the predominant perspective. If you look at the  whole country, I won't give you the full list, but just so we put a couple here, there's one  poll from Pew which finds that about six in ten Americans say on the issue of going far  enough, the right far the right distance or not far enough on making trans people feel okay, not discriminated against, understanding their issues. 60% say we've hit the right note or we  actually have not gone far enough. There's one from the Hill. About 60% of the country is against  any restrictions on drag performances. This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. You maybe you  will dispute the numbers, maybe you won't. But those are some of the data I'm working with.  Doesn't it seem as though the Anti-woke idea is maybe overplaying a hand that might  do well in some parts of the country but won't win a national campaign, as evidenced  by what Ron DeSantis is seeing right now, losing 42% of his support in the primary?

Vivek: So I want to say something, which I've said before, but it does seem to  matter. So I'm going to say it anyway. The media seems to be the one that uses a  label of anti-woke to describe my campaign. I am running a campaign to revive national  identity and at the time I wrote "Woke inc." you know what? People criticized the title. Back  then, People said, "nobody knows what this word is." Okay. So at the time I wrote  the book, that was actually the chief criticism  of the title. And unlike many on both the left  and right, I will define exactly what it is that  I view as a symptom of the deeper malaise in our country.

Pakman: I thought that you were going   to define woke itself.

Vivek: Now. Well, "wokeness" is a symptom and I will define the symptom, but  it is also a deeper cancer. And wokeness is a worldview that says that there are certain  invisible social relationships between us grounded on oppression or oppressor relationships  and statuses of people based on race, gender and sexuality that you're either oppressor or  oppressed based on those genetic attributes, that there are invisible societal injustices resulting  from them, and that we have to be awake, alert to  those injustices and then correct for them. Left  to right. I think you have to agree that that's a neutral definition that describes at least what we're talking about.

Pakman: I have a different one, which is much simpler, which is simply becoming woke,  is becoming aware that there are problems in our society bigger than any one person's  circumstances. That's how I define it. And I know it's very different from what you're saying.

Vivek: That's that's a slightly different definition, and one that is set up for more people  to agree with it. But I think that that's not a, respectfully David, That's a definition that on its own does not support the specificity of policies that follow from it. Right? Racial quota systems in boardrooms. The fact that a company  cannot list on Nasdaq unless it has a certain number of quotas filled by racial minorities or  sexual minorities on its board. That is a much more specific instantiation that more closely tracks my  definition of wokeness than a general simplified definition that there are just vaguely "some things wrong" in  the world and that there are systems that don't result from individual behavior. Well, okay, that's a big  leap to get from there to racial quota systems, especially when actually in that very rule and I'm  just triple clicking on that just to get specific, but it is not an outlier. It is an example  of what we see pervasively where people then came back and said, Well, how about  veteran status or disability status?   To which the government, the SEC and the  Nasdaq said no, because that would reduce the desire to forms of diversity on that board. So  we are talking about very specific instantiation of a culture that we can't just elide in the  form of a general neutral definition, that there  

are some unfair systems that when you correct  for them, that's not the essence of the claim.  A definition that alone would support the range of policies  that we see. And so I think we have to owe it to ourselves to at least be specific and get on the  table, where I'll give Ibram Kendi at least some credit for being specific when he expressly  says "The right answer to past discrimination is present discrimination. The right answer to  present discrimination is future discrimination."   Those are his words, not mine. You have to take  people like Ayanna Pressley at their word. "We don't want any more black or brown faces that  don't want to be a black or brown voice." I know that's a little bit uncomfortable to smoke out  because it makes a lot of my friends on the left uncomfortable because they don't want to agree  with those exact statements, even though they do want to agree with the more simple and neutral definition of  wokeness that you provided. But we have to smoke that out when there are policies that directly  track what the leading advocates of this movement have said in their own words. That's not me  putting words in anybody else mouth. I think we have to own that up and get that on the table  so we can actually have an honest, clean hearted debate about it.  

Pakman: Yeah, what's interesting about that is, most of the examples you're coming up  with as someone on the progressive left are not examples I would defend. And simultaneously,  it sounds like you're also not denying that when it comes to the way we treat people, when it comes to the questions asked in these polls about Wokeness, when it comes to  trans controlling books, drag shows, etc., I'm not hearing that that's actually the fight  you really want to have. Which if that's the case,  

I like that. I think that that's good. Yeah. 

Vivek: I think that we all need to do better of "smoking out" the best argument for the side that we actually disagree with to contend with that. Not  with some "caricature" of it. I saw a little bit of it in the start of  this conversation, right, where you're going to be able to smoke out a simplified version of that which can be caricatured. But these are our fellow citizens. Their concerns come from a deep place, where if you  can do a better job of articulating and smoking out where that concern comes from, then we have an  obligation to do that. And that's what gives me my motivation in this race, where people will say,  Somebody's living 50 miles radius of where I am in central Ohio today and, for example, they say  the First Amendment applies to tech companies. Oh!, They're rubes because they don't know that  that only applies to the government. To then actually, double click on that and say, you know  what? There's something to that intuition. And it turns out if a private actor's doing what the  government actually implicitly goaded them to do,   then the First Amendment does apply in every  instance. To be able to say that when there is something of value there, don't just sweep that under the rug and reject it. Smoke it out, and then let's have that real debate.